Keep it Secret, Keep it Safe — Foraging for Wimberries on the West Pennine Moors
We exchanged gentle nods and quiet hellos as we crossed paths one summer’s morning on the West Pennine Moors.
He, a strangely dressed older gentleman, descending the steep hill in his smart shoes and cream linen suit, a stripy corner shop carrier bag in his left hand. And I, a lone woman in my early thirties, kitted out in my best dog walking gear, minus the dog, with an ice cream tub barely hidden in my lumpy tote bag. It was obvious to both of us where he’d been, and where I was going, but it was equally clear neither of us could acknowledge why we were there.
We were on the hunt for scrubby little bushes dotted with tiny purple blobs of fruit; we were wimberry picking.
The wimberry shrub, or to use its Latin name, Vaccinium Myrtillus, grows in abundance along country paths. Yet, paradoxically, it’s rarely spotted by those of us who ramble up and down these (largely) public thoroughfares. Nature has thoughtfully covered our British moorlands with them, sometimes using them to line ancient woodland. And for a short period each year—usually around August or September, depending on how much summer sun we’ve enjoyed—they become covered in a rash of tart little fruits, which are easily spotted, once you know they’re there. But when they do appear, they’re increasingly going unpicked. By human hands at least.
I hadn’t seen, let alone tasted a wild wimberry until that day last summer. But, I’d heard so much about them from the older members of my family. When I was little, my grandma, Millicent, would point out the pretty little wooden punnets when they appeared in the shops. That was over 20 years ago, and they’re rarer still, as greengrocers and market stalls have made way for supermarkets and uniformity.
But wimberries are still out there, same as they ever were.
***
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard someone refer to wimberry picking as “foraging.” Foraging gives the impression of rooting around—you don’t root for wimberries. You head straight to your source, pick them, shove a few straight into your gob, and then leave with your bounty, deep purple fingers, and the location of your patch firmly kept secret.
But this eccentricity of secret picking and the fact no one region of the UK can agree on their name might be the reason for their rarity in our diet.
So far I’ve been calling them wimberries because one, I’m stubborn to a fault, and two, I grew up in Oldham, Greater Manchester, at the very foot of a set of moors that has one boot in historic Lancashire and the other in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Speaking to Alan Price, landscape manager for Northern Roots—a pioneering project to create the UK's largest urban farm and eco-park here in Oldham—we know we’re talking about the same fruit, although we can’t help but use very different names.
Illustrations by Laurel Molly
“Well, I’m not from Oldham. I’m from Liverpool, but I’ve been living here since the early 80s. So there we go.” Alan tells me as we clear the tricky language barrier. Despite being a resident of our town since before I was born, he still refers to wimberries—a sort of wild European cousin to the blueberry—as bilberries.
There are more names for wimberries than I can comfortably fit into a paragraph, but I’ll try. You’ve got the confusingly similar winberries or whimberries, where one single letter makes all the difference. If that doesn’t work for you, how about bilberries, blaeberries or bulberries? Maybe a wild card name like whortleberries, huckleberries, myrtleberries or perhaps even fraughan (thought to be an anglicised version of the Irish word, fraochán)?
Is it any wonder, with so many names, we struggle to pass on this berry folk knowledge?
“[This is why] we need the Latin. Because the local names can be very confusing and it’s easy to get mixed up,” Alan, whose dad worked in Formby, a town on the Lancashire coast, not far from Liverpool, says. But he’s not convinced we’ve found the seed of the problem by focusing on a name.
“If we went back to our childhood [in the 1960-1970s] it was common to go out and pick and forage for food. Although, due to wimberries favouring, acidic rural (ericaceous) conditions over urban environments, it seems our cities were the first to lose touch with wild food,” he tells me.
““It seems our cities were the first to lose touch with wild food.””
“I was very lucky, my dad was a baker so we had an allotment area out the back of the bakery—but you’d often go out foraging. In Liverpool, it was virtually unknown, because you’d have to go to the park to forage, and there wasn’t a lot of fruit planted in the parks in those days.”
Unlike when he was a kid, it doesn’t seem like there are many young people out on hills, picking wimberries. “The people that I meet out nowadays if they are between the age of 30 and 50, they’ll be there because their parents used to go out foraging,” Alan says.
I fit his description, but I wasn’t taught to pick. I’d heard the tales, but not the ecological details. It had always been described to me, mainly by my aunties, and their aunties and uncles, as a freedom-filled way for post-war children to spend a fun afternoon in the country. Dying your hands temporarily, and your pinafore permanently, as the minuscule purple berries pop in your pudgy-picking fingers, before taking your treasures home for busy mams to bake into crumbles and pies—which some people call a mucky mouth pie (due to its tendency to stain your tongue purple.)
***
Folk knowledge, as a rule, is verbal. But occasionally, you’ll find a book that breaks with convention, such as The Yorkshire Forager, A Wild Food Survival Guide by Alysia Vasey.
But Alysia’s book, in part, chronicles the graver side of foraging. Her grandad Bogdan Adam Stefan Szperka was born in Poznań, Poland, in 1925—before making his way to Norland, West Yorkshire, after the Second World War. He’d survived the war by hiding from the occupying forces of the German SS in a forest after escaping en route to the Fort VII Nazi death camp (Konzentrationslager Posen). It was in the forest where he learnt to forage.
Although he was (understandably) reluctant to share what happened in those years, he made sure his foraging knowledge would survive beyond his lifetime—passing it on to his grandchildren. He wanted to make sure they would never go hungry, as he nearly did.
Yet as unlikely as it sounds, he made it fun. Turning simple walks in the woods into pop-quizzes on tree species—including freshly fallen beechnuts as delicious, educational treats—with his border collie, Doogle, bounding alongside. Now living in Britain, he made sure his children picked those Yorkshire wimberries. Sorry, I mean bilberries.
“We always knew when the berries were ripe, because we’d see flocks of wood pigeons descending to feast on them,” Alysia writes, reflecting on her 1970s childhood memories. “When any of them flew down and landed in the garden, their poo would be bright purple, and if Grandad saw that, we’d be straight up to harvest our share before they scoffed them all”.
Bogdan is now in his 90s, and like generations before him, can no longer make the steep journey to reach the berries before the birds. But not many people go fruit picking today anyway, even when they physically can.
““I always go by a very simple foraging rule of leaving a place so it looks like you’ve never been.””
“If you had to do something for a long time, but then you don’t have to do it anymore [to survive] you really don’t want to,” says Amy Rankine, a foraging instructor, offering me a possible reason for why we’ve allowed this cultural practice to slip. Amy lives even further north than either me, Alan, Alysia or Bogdan. She’s from Livingston, to the west of Edinburgh, meaning I’ve hit another language barrier—she calls them blaeberries.
Every year I see curious people posting in local Facebook groups, asking where to find wimberries, but receiving no answer. Last year people typed “foraging” into Google more than ever before—unsurprising given all the pandemic walks and searches for mindful activities—so there’s definitely an appetite to save our wild food culture. But if every forager was to relent and tell us their secret spots, “where are they going to go for it?” Amy patiently explains.
“The one place that you’ve told them, they’re going to go there again and again and again and again,” she says. “How many people do you tell, and how many people do they tell?”
Until I learnt where to look and what to look for, I found all this secrecy frustrating. It was why my neighbours have always refused to tell me where to look and why the eccentric man on the moors greeted me discreetly. But I’m coming around to the idea, as Amy continues asking me; if a load of people suddenly start picking in the same area, “what pressure does that put on one small piece of the environment?”.
“I always go by a very simple foraging rule of leaving a place so it looks like you’ve never been,” Amy tells me.
Maybe keeping wimberry picking secrets in the family isn't such a bad idea after all.
