Ben Law - Woodsman

As I continue north beyond Prickly Nut Wood, I take a favourite route that takes me up the zigzag to Blackdown. On the way through Blackdown Park, I pass an orchard of plums and apples that I planted ten years earlier. The trees are now well established and cropping well, and sheep graze beneath them – a classic silvi-pastoral landscape. The zigzag is a steep climb up to the Temple of the Winds, where a stone bench marks one of the finest views in the south of England. Looking out from the Temple of the Winds, it is hard to imagine the motor car has been invented or that we are anywhere near the highly populated south of England. The border between Sussex and Surrey passes over Blackdown, and the area was one of the first pieces of land the National Trust acquired. In recent times – with the felling of timber and the grazing of cattle – much of the hillside has been returned to heathland.

I often visit here with my children for bilberry picking, as the reduction in tree cover has encouraged the spread of this prolific berry across the open heath. The wild relative of the blueberry, it is delicious in flavour and ensures the children’s hands and faces are more purple than when we have been blackberrying. Plenty are consumed while picking but others are taken home for one of my seasonal favourites – bilberry pancakes. I remember as a child that strawberries had a particular season. Now, with imported food, it is possible to eat them all year round, and the energy cost of transporting them is reflected in the price, unlike the associated pollution. The excitement and anticipation of waiting for the first strawberries to ripen have been taken away and in doing so this exquisite fruit – at its best when plucked straight from the plant – has become trapped in a plastic package and transported around the globe. It is the eating of fruit in their particular season that makes our connection with growing food so special and foraging such a delight. Blueberries are readily available all year round, but bilberries, they have their season and even then you will not find them in the shops. This perfect little berry creates a day of adventure. A picnic is prepared, water bottles filled and a mission undertaken to venture out across the heathland. A whole day unveils itself around this seasonal fruit. Games of hide and seek are interspersed with more picking. My son Zed becomes a bilberry scout, venturing ahead and alerting us busy pickers behind him to the treasures he discovers. Tess, my daughter, is picking well, her face blotched purple from her stained fingers. ‘Look at this one,’ she shrieks, finding a good-sized bilberry. As the day draws on she is on my shoulders as we start our descent and the journey home.

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