I ve done it since I was a kid, says Reid. I love bramblesand bramble jelly. It has a taste all of its own. This is early September, which means the bramble-picking season isstill in its infancy, but already the country lanes of Scotland arebunching up with the juicy, luscious, edible berry. Reid and hiskind have their plastic bowls ready, their boots to hand, and maybea crooked stick to haul down the high yins where the bramble,bulging up there through exposure to sun and rain, is ripened andready for snatching. I ve known days when, if you know where tolook, you can fill a gallon-pail with the fruit, says Reid. The hedgerows are already in bud: some brambles are ready, othersneed another week or two. The end of September is widely viewed asthe prime time for picking when the bushes are at their mostheavenly with the fat, fleshy bramble yet even this weekendthere is still an early, ready harvest. The mouth waters justthinking about the next three weeks. All over Britain there are prime spots for brambles, and Scotlandboasts some of the best. Around the country roads of Ayrshire,Perthshire, Fife and the Borders you ll find wild brambles thatare dripping off their vines and fit to be served up to kings. Inthe past few days I ve seen the berries sprouting so voluptuouslythat you just want to stop the car, jump out and have anon-the-spot feast. Reid, 75, and has lived within a third of a mile radius near Dunlopin Ayrshire all his days. The son of a farmer, and with countryways steeped in his veins, he relishes the bramble season because,first, it is an annual rite of passage, and second, because itmeans he can make his mouth-watering bramble jelly. When I was a wee lad my father and mother knew all the places toget brambles around here, Reid tells me. We were on the farmand you d either eat the fruit off the bush as a snack on your wayto school, or my mother would store up the brambles to make herbramble jelly. On the farm there was my mother, father, me, my brother andsister, plus a maid and a few farm workers this was in the 1940s and my mother had to cook for all of us. She used to say, Ineed 365 pounds of jam a year for all the jelly we would getthrough. She cooked all sorts, but just about every day we d have a jampiece or a jam scone, and that s when the brambles came into theirown. My father had this stick where he d howk down the high yins they were the best, the big, juicy ones. Talking to Reid I get the sense of an authentic man living anauthentic life. I grew up in a place where home baking and homeproduce was the norm, he says. We had all fruits: gooseberries,rasps, strawberries, redcurrants, plums, rhubarb, damsons, everything. Every day cakes or scones were baked, but theberry season was the best. On brambles Reid is lucidly clear. They have a marvelloustaste, he says. And bramble jelly has a flavour all of its own.The real, true jelly has a bright, reddy colour and it should be asclear as ice. It is gorgeous. Out into the nearby lanes we step, where I hav enjoyed an hour ofbrambling just the day before, and there they are, bunching thickerand thicker . There are many knacks to picking brambles, and one of them is toclimb the stile and pick from the field side where the fruit isunseen and quite often the best but beware of the bull. Alas, the best brambles are often where the bush is at itsprickliest or thorniest. The true bramble-picker will tell youthat, after a couple of hours of rewarding picking, the hands andarms can be covered in scratches from foraging away for the mostprized fruit. In Canada, and even in some places in Scotland, scientists havecontrived something of a bramble blasphemy: a vine without any thorns at all. It is also a later fruit, becoming ripein mid-October, and said to be very good. But we needn t dwelllong on this grotesque parody of nature. Brambles are brambles:they are there to be picked and savoured, the purple juice runningdown your face. But they should come at a prickly price. Out in the lanes, we meet Alison, a mother of three children. Shesays she makes an oaty bramble bake with them, piling the oats andbrown sugar on top of the fruit in a bowl and sticking it in ahot oven for 25 minutes. Other locals around here use the brambles for crumbles, cakes, tohave with porridge, for oaty pies or compotes, plus, of course, forjams or jelly. It can be bloody, messy work. After two hours of foraging andpicking last week I had quite a few cuts and scratches, afruit-smeared face, plus blotches on my shirt and trousers wherethe juicy stains from the brambles left their imprint. Youcertainly don t go out brambling in your Sunday best. Then again,if you live in the country, as I do, you tend to dress down sometimes to a shambolic, even eccentric degree. Then there s the competition to deal with.
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