You may have already been picking and enjoying that most delicious of wild fruits - the bilberry or blaeberry or fraughan. When the Festival of Lughnasa was firmly fixed to the first Sunday of August, Fraughan Sunday or Domhnach na bhFraochog, Maire Mac Neill tells us in her magnificent book The Festival of Lughnasa, tended to move to earlier Sundays in July, and under various names as befitted the region. In Inishowen, for example, it took the name Heatherberry Sunday - or Mulberry Sunday in another part of the county, for while mulberry means a different fruit to most people, that's what they called the vaccinium myrtillus, Latin for bilberry to most of us. There are even other names for this tiny, delicate plant and fruit: whortleberry, shortened in southern counties to Whort Sunday or even Hurt Sunday. Blaeberry Sunday is the name given to it in "English-speaking Ulster", she tells us. In England it may be known as the whinberry or wimberry and hurts becomes urts.
The cultivated form, or blueberry, is not bad, but half the enjoyment of savouring the bilberry or fraughan comes from the difficulty or delicacy of its picking. As you know, you have to fold back the leaves even to see the berry, and while professionals may use a sort of comb (several types have been seen in hardware shops in the Pyrenees Orientales of France), most of us just get our fingers coloured purple and eat as we go, rather than picking and putting into a basket. It can make good jam, but some find it too sweet and miss the tang of the real thing.
In Devon, we are told by Richard Mabey, however, they are cooked in pies. (And coming back to France, a magazine, in writing about wild berries such as this, warns that in districts where there is known disease among foxes, berries should be washed before eating. Cooked, they will, of course, be quite above suspicion. They give a map of areas of possible contamination.) In England and several parts of Wales (and on the Isle of Man), remnants of the old festival of Lughnasa style of Sunday outing lasted until comparatively recently.
An old Belfast friend used to say that he celebrated the beginning of the school summer holidays by climbing the Cave Hill and there, on the south-facing slopes beside the great basalt mass of Mac Art's Fort, he hailed his release by gorging on the many bilberries already ripe at the end of June.