Donal Hickey: Best blackberry season in years, isn't it?

There's a bumper crop of blackas on the brambles this year thanks to a great summer — scroll down for recipes for blackberry gin and blackberry drizzle cake

Blackberry-stained hands from picking a bumper crop. Cork city, Sunday, August 31. Pictures: Larry Cummins

The blackberry season is well underway and heavily-laden brambles (briars) provide evidence of a bumper crop this year, probably due to the excellent summer weather.

But, if you haven’t been out picking yet, don’t worry. Still green and red berries that are still  will ripen in autumn days, extending the supply for a few more weeks.

It’s a cherished annual custom. There’s a sense of time-travel à la Alice Taylor to childhood days when we took to the fields bearing buckets and pans towards the end of the school summer holidays.

Blackberries on the bramble, Cork

The berries were then turned into delectable jams, pies and crumbles. And isn’t it hard to resist eating blackberries — sometimes called ‘blackas’ in Cork — in a raw state, so to speak, as you move along the ditches… lovely, juicy and sweet!

Our collection area this year was in the heart of that rolling, fertile countryside around Dunderrow, between Kinsale and Innishannon, County Cork, where we were happy to pass on an old tradition to a new generation. We also came upon a few wild raspberries.

Blackberry recipes

Blackberry crumble

Lemon and blackberry drizzle cake

Chocolate tart served with blackberries

Apple and wild blackberry crumble with hazelnuts and Irish whiskey cream

Blackberry and sweet geranium sorbet

Blackberry and sweet geranium gin

Apple and blackberry pie

There’s a visceral joy in collecting wild fruit for free, dating to an era when we didn’t have the abundant supplies of imported fruits and berries available in Ireland today. Blackberry is as healthy as you’ll get — low-calorie, low-fat, high-fibre, and a source of vitamins C and K.

The bramble is a tough shrub, forming broad thickets and providing good, natural fencing. It’s prickly and can draw blood from fingers if you don’t accurately target the berries you’re picking.

Sméara dubha

Nor are the people from the ‘otherworld’ supposed to be far away. In folklore, we’re told the fairies can hang around the thorny briars which offer protective cover of their sacred spaces.

Eminent UCC food historian Regina Sexton says the blackberry is of "notable cultural significance" in Irish life, not least because it evokes all sorts of nostalgia.

Writing in RTÉ’s Brainstorm, she says that, in comparison to other seasonal wild purple fruits, like bilberries, elderberries and sloes, blackberries were easy to find, identify and collect. All of which made them the quintessential representative of wild summer and autumn fruits.

“With their high and aromatic taste profile and versatile culinary uses, blackberrying was emblematic of childhood and it brought a sense of agency to children's activities and endowed pickers with a bank of emotive memories."

This is also shown in the national schools folklore collection from the 1930s, with one pupil, Betty Connell, of Ardura Beg, Ballydehob, County Cork, saying people made superb wines from sloes, blackberries, dandelions, elderberries, rhubarb and many others.

“My mother makes a delicious wine from sloes," she proudly added.