Overview
The best surviving piece of the Pale is easy to walk straight past: a 220-metre grass bank running through a housing estate at Balally in south Dublin, no more than waist-high. It is not much to look at, and that is the honest truth of the place – there is no wall, no tower, just a low, flat-topped ridge in the ground that you have to know to read. But it is the one stretch of this medieval frontier that is both documented and still visible, and once you can pick it out, it holds the attention.
The Pale was the part of Ireland kept under direct English control in the late Middle Ages, shrunk by the 1400s to the four ‘obedient shires’ of Dublin, Kildare, Meath and Louth. Inside it, English common law ran; outside, the Brehon law of the Gaelic lords held. The border was marked by an earthwork – a ditch and bank, palisaded in places – first dug when trenches were ordered along the frontier in 1454, and formally mandated by the 1494 parliament of Sir Edward Poynings. It never fully stopped a raid, but it gave the phrase ‘beyond the pale’ to English, shorthand for anything past the edge of the accepted.
The bank at Balally
Balally is the section to seek out. About 220 metres of the earthwork survive: a flat-topped bank 3 to 4 metres wide on top and 6 metres at the base, standing 1 to 1.2 metres high, with a shallow fosse around 2 metres wide on each side. The southern part was kept within the Kilcross housing estate; the northern part was recorded, then cut, during the building of the South-Eastern Motorway.
The best detail comes from the 2000 excavation. Alongside the ditch, archaeologists found a cobbled trackway with cart-wheel ruts still visible in the stones, and the foundation trench of a mortar-and-granite wall. The flat top of a Pale bank was often reused as a dry, level path in medieval and later times, which is part of how these stretches survived at all.
Getting there
Balally is on the Luas Green Line, not the DART; the stop is a short walk from the bank, which is visible from the public footpath alongside the road. Buses 44, 161, L25 and 74 also pass nearby. On-street parking is limited and mainly for residents, so the tram is much the easier arrival.
The earthwork sits on a public right-of-way, with signs asking visitors to keep to the footpath. Come in low light – early morning or late afternoon – and out of the growing season, when long shadows and short grass make the bank and ditch far easier to pick out against the ground.
Nearby
A little further south, Carrickmines has the remains of a medieval castle, uncovered during the M50 works, which gives more context to how this frontier was held and fought over.