The more the berrier

A day ago , by Richard Lutz

Richard Lutz ambles through the brambles

It’s that time of year. People, all kinds, walk around with hands stained purple as blackberries (aka brambles), juicy and black/blue, are ready to harvest. It’s accepted as fact that 31% will be gobbled down rather than plucked and gathered in containers, bags, boxes or baskets. They’re just too good to leave alone.

The hands eventually get washed. As do the berries to get out bugs and worms. Then the pickings are put in pies or over breakfast cereal. Best of all (for me anyway) is apple and bramble crumble with custard slopping all over it. Brambles have a great botanical name- rubus fruticosus. Try saying that with a mouth stuffed with freshly-picked berries straight off a spikey shrub.

In the fields barley is gathered in:

We sit on the edge of an idle tractor. The farmer is taking a break. His crop, and it’s a good crop this year, has already been sold (pre-harvest) to a mill that will mix the grain with other ingredients to produce winter animal feed.

I guess that’s the way of the world; food for the farm stock rather than the folks. It’s a sensitive topic- the mass of good land that is for sheep and cattle grazing. Those who know more than me about agro-business say farmland is being mis-used. But to me if the flocks and beef herds aren’t fed, just where do we get the milk, cheese, wool and meat? It’s a touchy unanswered question.

The wild bramble, unruly, prickly, thorny, studded with ripe berries, border a rolling Scots terrain that tilts and curves:

There’s not a scrap of flat land. Fields dip, twist, roll and rise. Colours turn autumnal and fade:

Above is Mochrum Hill. It’s a volcanic plug eroded by eons of time, wind, rain and countless days:

Viewed from across a quiet valley, Mochrum seems a mini-hillock. Once it was a mountain. Underneath its top, the brambles seem to congregate, for some reason, near rowan trees that bear red berries:

Maybe they like the same things: tangled hedges, September warmth. sunlight.

Rowan berries attract the birds with their bright red colours. They’re only edible to humans when cooked – they’re sour but rich in vitamin C.

Down by the shore, fields of mustard and wild radish create patchwork corners of Ayrshire.

You can just about pick out, on the horizon, another volcanic plug called Ailsa Craig. It’s a twin of Mochrum. But this chunk of rock is not a bump of a hill but an island of granite rising 1100 feet from the sea. It’s nicknamed Paddy’s Milestone as it’s perceived, by some, as halfway from the Scottish coast to Ireland. Sailors and mariners may disagree with that estimate.

pix: Evelyn Simak, Derek Harper