There is an old track above Glencree that the walkers' maps call a green road and everyone I know calls the bog road. For most of the year it is a strip of grass between the bracken and a dry stone wall. For about three weeks in September the brambles growing out of that wall are so heavy with fruit that you can fill a lunchbox in the time it takes to eat what you pick.
My grandmother in Mayo had a rule: you never pick below the height of a dog, and you never pick after Michaelmas, the twenty-ninth of September, because after that the devil has spat on them. The first rule is sensible. The second is roughly right too, since by October the berries go watery and the flies have found them. So this is the week.
Picking
Bring a hard box rather than a bag, because blackberries crush under their own weight. Take only the ones that come away with a gentle pull; if you have to tug, it is not ready. Leave plenty for the birds and for the next person. When you get home, tip them into a bowl of cold water, let any small visitors float to the top, then drain them on a tea towel.
The crumble
My oven takes one dish at a time, and the dish I have is an oval one about 22 cm long. This fills it.
For the fruit:
- 2 cooking apples, Bramley if you can find them, about 450 g
- 250 g blackberries
- 50 g caster sugar
- 1 tablespoon of cornflour
- a squeeze of lemon
For the top:
- 120 g plain flour
- 40 g porridge oats
- 80 g cold butter, cubed
- 70 g light brown sugar
- a pinch of salt
Heat the oven to 190°C, or 170°C with a fan. Peel, core and slice the apples about as thick as a pound coin. Put them in a small pot with a tablespoon of water and cook them gently with the lid on for five minutes, just until the edges begin to soften. Bramleys collapse quickly, and a minute too long turns them into sauce, which is not the end of the world but is not what we want.
Take the pot off the heat and fold in the blackberries, the sugar, the cornflour and the lemon. The cornflour stops the juice running all over the oven floor. Tip it into the dish.
For the top, rub the butter into the flour and salt with your fingertips until there are no lumps bigger than a pea. Stir in the oats and the sugar. Then squeeze a few handfuls of it together and drop them back in, so there are some proper clumps. Scatter it over the fruit without pressing it down.
Bake for thirty-five to forty minutes, until the top is golden and the juice is bubbling up purple at the edges. Leave it for ten minutes before you go near it with a spoon; that is when the fruit sets.
To go with it
Custard from a packet, made with whole milk, and I will hear nothing against it. If there are berries left over, they freeze well spread out on a tray and then bagged, and a handful in January porridge is a small, private celebration.