08-08-2025
All you need to know about the blackberry season
Analysis: The blackberry is a plant of notable cultural significance in Ireland, not least in its ability to evoke all sorts of emotional memories and nostalgia
It's the blackberry season. The still red and green fruits will darken and ripen over the coming weeks and the white, sometimes blush, flowers will form into berries later, prolonging the supply over several autumn months.
The bramble is a widespread shrub, often forming dense thickets with vigorous stems or canes that climb or trail, making the plant a resilient presence in urban as well as its more usual rural settings. As a tough native perennial, the blackberry shrub, with its hundreds of microspecies, holds a long-lived practical, culinary, and economic presence in Ireland, and as a result is a plant of notable cultural significance; not least in its ability to evoke all sorts of emotional memories and nostalgia.
The prolonged annual seasonal presence of the blackberry gives us ample opportunity to time-travel, especially to childhood when the excitement and exhilaration of collecting food for free fixed to the near wondrous taste of the first sweet berry. Richard Mabey, one of the pioneering advocates for collecting wild foods, explains that the cluster-forming design of the stems is helpful in deciding which berries to eat raw and which to keep for culinary uses. His 1972 Food for Free advises 'the lowest berry- right at the tip of the stalk- is the first to ripen, and it is the sweetest and fattest of all. Eat it raw. A few weeks later, the other berries near the end ripen; these are less juicy, but still good for jams and pies.'
From RTÉ Lyric FM's Daybreak with Evonne Ferguson, Naturefile profiles the blackberry, commonly found in Ireland from the end of the summer until October
This first berry is not only sweet, but it is intensely aromatic and once consumed the berry-picking could become a bit more tedious and pricklier, especially if it rained, which tended to spoil or dilute the taste of the collected berries in the can. Moving on to the second phase of blackberrying, the cooking and preserving stage, added to this assortment of memories. Therefore, blackberrying, as a multisensorial activity, bonded memories to childhood, evoking the joy of those days with a sense of lost innocence.
The following child's account from Monaghan from the Dúchas Schools' Collection is as timeless and soothingly nostalgic as it is familiar:
I usually take a whole day blackberrying. I take a pint tin and a white enamel bucket. I gather them in the tin and then put them into the bucket. If it begins to rain I have to stop picking as they would not keep. I do not gather them along the road as they are too dusty. I always go round the fields where they are sure to be clean. I only pick the largest ones and I do not pick any that are too ripe. If I do not get all I require in one day I go out a second day. I usually bring one of my chums with me and we divide whatever we pick between us.
As with the case of bilberries, the children's own reports in the Collection suggest that collecting blackberries was a norm fixed to their seasonal routines. An expression frequently provided by the children that 'I play blackberries in autumn' implies that the activity was an integral and standard one, while the now-forgotten expression that something is 'as plenty as blackberries' denotes the fruit's ubiquitous presence.
In comparison to other seasonal wild purple fruits, like bilberries, elderberries and sloes, blackberries were easy to find, identify and collect making 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 as sense of agency to children's activities and endowed pickers with a bank of emotive memories to indulge reflective nostalgia.
Seamus Heaney reads Blackberry Picking
That one berry should hold such a network of intermeshed meanings makes it one of cultural, historical, archaeological, material and, indeed, literary import. The blackberry is an item of interest in all these disciplines and it goes without saying that it was a useful food resource from the prehistoric period to near contemporary times. There are also slight pockets of evidence detailing the use of berries, roots and canes as dye material and medicinal resources.
The versatility of the plant, therefore, accounts for its inclusion in the list of protected woodland shrubs in early medieval law as outlined by the Celtic scholar, Fergus Kelly, in his 1997 publication, Early Irish Farming. While legal provision for shrubs is not as consequential as that applied to the nobles of the woods (oak, hazel, holly, and wild apple), it does suggest nonetheless a degree of woodland protection, and possibly management, applied to shrubs that have economic importance, and no doubt that value connected to the plant's food and culinary uses.
Sources contemporary with the laws indicate that berries were eaten with oatmeal, milk, honey and nuts. Indeed, in a paper published in 1998 in Early Medieval Munster: Archaeology, History and Society, I suggest that such mixtures, seasonally variable, resembled a type of muesli. Interestingly, such meal and milk mixtures continue to feature in folk memory and folklife accounts into the early decades of the twentieth century.
From RTÉ Radio 1's Sunday Miscellany, Blackberry-Picking by Kathy Donaghy
By then, the list of blackberry recipes appearing in cookery books, magazines and newspapers is extensive. For instance, the Belfast News Letter in September 1922 gives readers six options for blackberries including blackberry trifle; blackberry and tapioca mould; cold blackberry jelly; sponges; rolls; and apple and blackberry jelly.
For desserts, blackberries went into mousses, puddings, fritters, cobblers, custards, souffles and meringues. They were baked into cakes, pies and tarts with some of the best loved being a mix of apples and berries. They were made into syrups, vinegars and wines, and of course, they went towards preserves in the form of jams and jellies that with careful household management could last into the winter months.
However, away from the structured formality of the recipe, the Dúchas accounts of cooking and consuming blackberries provide insight into the more routine culinary uses. Here, jams and jellies are frequently mentioned, blackberry wine is popular, as are cakes, as in one from Kerry made with flour, eggs, butter, cream, apples and berries. In Cavan, a fine oatmeal flummery was sugar-sweetened and eaten with blackberries:
A pint of milk was put into a saucepan & while it was coming to a boil oatmeal was sifted through a very fine sieve or strained. The sifted meal was added to the boiling milk & then sweetened with sugar. All was allowed to boil for five or ten minutes. When nearly cold the contents of saucepan was eaten with stewed fruit-blackberries.
In Laois, stewed blackberries were eaten on bread so 'you might go on with your hard work.' The simplest of all descriptions was that in a young girl's letter to the Weekly Irish Times in October 1905. Here she gives the starring role to the blackberry in a description that would be at home in the current vogue for minimalist menu-writing - blackberries, milk, sugar. She writes with warmth and affection: 'I often mix some [blackberries] with sugar and milk, and they are lovely.'
From RTÉ Radio 1's Liveline, callers discuss the joys of blackberry picking
But rather than romanticise these accounts, remembering contextual details is important. Here is evidence of a food system that has undergone irrevocable change since the mid-20th century. The obvious affection for the berries and blackberrying connects to their seasonal presence. Today, by contrast, berries are everyday and everywhere, with production linked to global agri-systems and supported by a wellness industry that prizes the relatively low-carbohydrate profile of mostly tasteless berries.
Outside these systems, the seasonal berry of the accounts above was a rare, anticipated but fleeting pleasure. Gathering in the best depended on tacit knowledge of how, where and when to collect and how to distinguish berries of different flavour profiles amongst the different microspecies.
Essentially, the tradition expected connection with the natural world and an understanding of the blackberry's variable presence within that system. The following riddle frequently appears in folk material and is not simply playful, but an insight into a world of essential and inherited but now somewhat erased knowledge.
