You've probably gone after them when you were young, up the mountains or indeed on many acid boggy areas down lower and often in woods: the bilberries, the fraughans, and even, in some parts of the country, whortleberries and blaeberries or even whorts or hurts. And there was a Sunday given over to them, sometimes in July and even into August, though that may be a bit late for some. It was at the festival time of Lughnasa anyway, or near enough, and it was often organised on heights and involved much matchmaking, general carousing and even faction fights.
It's not as much appreciated in this country for itself as in others, you might think, this little bluey-purple fruit which you have to rummage for under its leaves. Yet it is all around us, but we've lost the art of foraging. How many people go out in September with their enamel buckets after blackberries, which, in the past kept families supplied with either the jam - too many little seeds that got stuck in your teeth - or ideally, in the form of bramble jelly. Of course, there are certainly more of these berries than of the bilberry sort, but it is no credit to us that we had to leave it to the French to devise a simple and available device for collecting the latter. Picking them one by one from under the sheltering leaves is not easy. Jane Grigson in her Fruit Book (Penguin Cookery Library) tells us of finding down in the Aubergne shops which sell not only bilberry sweets and liqueurs but bilberry combs for gathering the fruits.
Shaped like a shovel, she writes, wooden sides and back, and the base is composed of thick parallel iron wires which curve up at the end to form a comb. You scoop the shovel through the low plants with an upward movement and collect in it the berries and some leaves. Simple to sort them out. And in France they are making a new liqueur of the fruit "as a substitute for cassis in the aperitif known as vin-blanc cassis or Kir." The name, of course is Myr. In France, too, she found what she calls the standard summer offerings of bilberry pies and tarts, bilberry sorbets, jams and bottled bilberries.
Of course here we can buy in plastic containers very welcome blueberries, domesticated version. Fine, but you miss the native, smaller berries. Finally, old Nicholas Culpeper judges that they "are good in hot agues, and to cool the heat of the liver and stomach; they do somewhat bind the belly and stay the vomitings and loathings." Y