Beyond the pale

Another very wet day. The spaniel and I tend to keep to the woods for a bit of shelter when its like this. Here there are quite long stretches where the ancient boundary separating the common land from the land in private ownership can still be found. The boundary is marked by a pale - a shallow ditch and a steep bank which may have been topped by a fence or a living hedge but is now mainly dominated by holly and hornbeam. This may have been designed to keep the commoners livestock from straying now we have ordinary dull stock fencing.