Blackberry picking a noble art

The blackberry is very much part of folk and rural traditions, writes Donal Hickey

Blackberries are ripening slowly this year, possibly due to poor sunshine in August. Brambles are full of berries which are still red but, hopefully, things will soon improve. Looking out at the back fence, drooping brambles laden with berries can be seen, but not many are yet black.

Ripening would want to hasten, however, for there’s an old proverb that you shouldn’t pick blackberries after Michaelmas Day (September 29) when the devil is supposed to put his foot on the berries. Like many another proverb, there may be some sense in that because, by then, the berries could be infested with worms and larvae.

The blackberry is very much part of folk and rural traditions. Another old adage is that a big crop of ripe blackberries presages a bad winter, but there isn’t much to prove that. However, some medical research shows blackberries in general to be antioxidants and to have some cancer-preventing and fighting qualities.

As children, our mothers had us out along the ditches, around the time we returned

to school after the long holidays, loading buckets with blackberries for making tarts and jams that would bring the taste of summer well into the cold days of winter.

Many people, yours truly included, still keep up the practice, delightfully recorded by writer Alice Taylor who was reared on a farm near Newmarket, Co Cork, in the 1940s. As we picked, we also sampled the berries which, in Ms Taylor’s words, left us with “purple-smudged’’ mouths and fingers before proceeding to fill our buckets to the brim. There was always a reminder to leave some for the birds.

Each berry has to be examined closely around the stem to ensure it doesn’t contain holes made by insects and worms of various kinds, generally indicated by a rotting texture at the base. Such berries are returned to the earth. If a blackberry is ready for picking it yields at the touch and comes easily to you; if not fully ripe, it requires a little force; if over-ripe, it squashes between your fingers.

Other wild berries in Ireland are known by several names such as fraocháns, fraughans and whorts. Author Michael J Conry has recalled that, in the first half of the 20th century, considerable quantities of fraughans and whorts were picked in counties Carlow, Wicklow, Tipperary and Waterford and exported to Britain. Hundreds of families harvested this fruit as they needed the money to buy food and clothe the children, he wrote.

People of the Great Blasket Island, Co Kerry, were not as lucky for, according to local scribe Sean Pheats Tom O Cearnaigh, there was only one blackberry bush on the whole island, so they had to row three miles to the mainland for berries.