25-07-2025
It's Bilberry Sunday this weekend but have you ever eaten one?
Analysis: The bilberry was an important feature of activities, games, food and entertainments associated with the festival of Lughnasa
In October 1925, the Weekly Irish Times ran a brief feature on bilberries in its 'A Nature Picture' column. An attractive monochrome sketch of the plant, captioned Whortleberry, accompanied a text that told readers it 'is a wonderful year for wild berries- blackberries are profuse everywhere, hips and haws abound… So, too, in its favourite habitats the whortleberry, blaeberry, or bilberry, as it is variously called, has a great crop of berries available for those who like them as an ingredient for pies and puddings.'
Depending on the economic wellbeing, location, age and marriage profile of readers, the newspaper details of this wild berry may have been very differently received. The bilberry shrub (Vaccinium myrtillus) grows wild on acidic soils of bog, moors and open woodland and it is frequently found growing amongst heather, hence its Irish names fraochán or fraochóg, following the Irish word for heather, fraoch. Once ripe in late July, it is sweet, juicy and flavoursome.
But October was certainly too late for picking as July and August were seen as the prime months for collecting the best-tasting bilberries. For those inclined to follow superstitious belief, bilberries were not to be collected after the first Sunday in August as the fairies and Crom Dubh, the dark and crooked figure of the harvest, had spat on them in the same way they spoiled and cursed blackberries at Halloween.
From RTÉ Lyric FM's Naturefile, a look at the bilberry, one of the richest natural sources of anthocyanins
For those in need of some extra cash, a good berry season was welcomed in rural areas where a network of pickers, buyers and sellers supported an important export industry in sending bilberries (and blackberries) to Britain in the first half of the 20th century. This export trade boomed during the two world wars and the story of bilberries in this industry is detailed comprehensively by Michael Conry in his 2011 publication, Picking Bilberries, Fraocháns and Whorts in Ireland: The Human Story.
For an urban readership, the bilberry may have been simply a curiosity unlike the ubiquitous blackberry, that remained a feature of city and town life and was connected to memories of childhood and family expeditions of collecting berries in the wild. But in rural areas, the bilberry remained an important feature of the celebrations of the harvest and its presence in the activities, games, craft skills, festive food, and entertainments associated with the festival of Lughnasa.
This important calendar marker between the last Sunday in July and the first Sunday in August was of practical, community, symbolic, and ritualistic significance to traditional agricultural societies. Its status is best illustrated in the numerous names of the festival that survived into the twentieth century: Harvest Sunday; Lammas Sunday; Bilberry Sunday; Mountain Sunday; Patron Sunday; Garland Sunday; Domhnach Chrom Dubh; Domhnach Fada; Domhnach na bhFraochóg. In fact, folklorist Máire MacNeill identified over 80 different local names for the festival in her seminal and sparkling 1962 publication, The Festival of Lughnasa: A Study of the Survival of the Celtic Festival of the Beginning of the Harvest.
From RTÉ Archives, Dermot Mullane reports for RTÉ News on Garland Sunday ceremonies at the holy well and mass rock of Tobernalt, Co Sligo in 1975
As with the other three Celtic-survival calendar festivals, Lughnasa was a focal point between seasons and a transition time between a change-over in agricultural work. The summer's fertility and the summer farm work around food production, particularly in terms of grain and potato cultivation, were about to be realised as summer transitioned into autumn.
MacNeill's scholarship identified surviving features that may have been transmitted from antiquity into 20th century Ireland. A sizeable part of her research concentrated on the responses gathered from a questionnaire which was sent out in Irish and English to correspondents of the Irish Folklore Commission in July 1942. The questionnaire, titled 'Domhnach Chrom Dubh', received 316 replies and these provided rich substantive detail in elucidating the main surviving features of the festival.
In terms of agriculture and food production, it was the beginning of the harvest and the start of the potato-digging season. It was also a time of weather and crop fertility omens. From a community perspective, it was a time of group visits and gatherings to mountain or hill-tops or to lake and river shores with celebratory dancing, music and singing and courtship rituals.
The understanding was that bilberries and potatoes bridged the temporal movement from one season to another
By the time MacNeill was undertaking her research, elements of older practice were fading. She concludes that 'no custom has been more lasting than the picking of bilberries which… gave the festival several names' and they were 'an earnest of the earth's fruitfulness, a bounty of the deity. And it was important that all should eat them and that some should be brought home to the old and weak who could not climb the hill.'
That the berries were an important integrated aspect of the festival is evident, as MacNeill points out, in the berry lending its name to the festival (bilberry, fraughan, blaeberry Sunday). Additionally, the numerous local and vernacular names for the berry (fraughans; hurts; hurds; hurs; blaeberries fraocháns, fraochóg, moonoges; caoraí dubha) quite possibly owes more to the significance of its symbolic attachment to the festive rituals than to its role as a free food resource.
Whether MacNeill's interpretation of the berries' symbolic meaning was to the fore in the consciousness of those who gathered the berries on the festival is impossible to determine. What is clear, though, is the continuation of a cluster of rituals associated with their gathering and consumption around the festival. The understanding was that bilberries and potatoes bridged the temporal movement from one season to another. The old (bilberries) and the new (potatoes) foods became the main items and ingredients of festive eating and meals with Lughnasa positioned as the first day to eat new potatoes and the last day to eat fraughans.
From British Pathé, the bilberry harvest in Bohemia, Czech Republic in the late 1940s
The berry picking followed a meal of new foods, namely new potatoes, new bacon and white cabbage. Mashed potato dishes, cally or colcannon made with milk, cream, onions and white cabbage were equally common as evident in other local names for the day; Colcannon Sunday and Sunday of the New Potatoes.
The post-meal activities of climbing hills or mountain tops was the time when the berries were gathered. Many were eaten on the spot. In some areas, the boys strung the berries with straw, rushes or thread to make bracelets and necklaces for their sweethearts. Others were stalked to safely carry them home to those who were too young, old or unable to make the climb. At home, the berries were made into jam, syrups, wines, cakes and pies.
To extend the courtship rituals associated with the festival, bilberry cakes were a feature of Lughnasa dances in some areas, as in this account from Kilkenny: 'All the young boys and girls for miles round came to climb the hill and pick the fraughans. Nor did they merely celebrate the day! The fraughans picked during the day were brought home by the boys to the various houses in the district and the young girls were commanded to make a 'Fraughan Cakes'.
This was an honour conferred on the girl as each boy came and took that girl as well as the cake to the Bonfire dance. The boys also provided the wood for the Bonfire. Tables were also loaned by the houses nearby to put the 'Fraughan Cakes' on.' The special status assigned to those selected to make the bilberry cakes or pies was also recorded in Co Mayo, where one girl was chosen to make the 'Pocaí Hócaí' or 'Rolaí Bolaí' pies that were eaten in the evening between the dancing and singing.
By the mid-20th century, much of the activity around bilberries lasted only in the rhythms of children's play, which may explain the frequent references that were provided by the children themselves to the National Folklore Schools' Collection. The children recorded that they 'play bilberries' in autumn alongside other seasonal games like hop scotch, kites, rounders, spinning tops and nut cracking. The transmission of tradition survivals amongst children is captured in the photographs of full-time collector with the Irish Folklore Commission, Michael J. Murphy, in Antrim between the 1950s and 1960s.
