It’s an apple-ripe September morning, as a Patrick Kavanagh poem puts it, but unlike his fields, the ones around Aughrim are not chilled, by mist or anything else.
With children safely back at school, the inevitable heatwave has descended. Even at 10am, the south Co Wicklow village is sun-baked.
The apples bit holds true, anyway. Our guide for a foraging walk of the surrounding countryside, Geraldine Kavanagh, has brought a basketful to distribute among us.
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“All our trees ripened at the same time,” she says. “We have more apples than we know what to do with.”
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Her tour starts in Aughrim’s pretty village park, set around a trout-filled lake, where our first stop is enforced by the discovery of a bunch of meadowsweet at the water’s edge.
It is to meadowsweet we owe the development of aspirin in the 1890s. The plant makes a pain-relieving tea as well. But as Kavanagh tells us, it was most prized in former times just for its smell.
During centuries past, meadowsweet used to be strewn on the floors of churches and other places where less-than-fragrant humans gathered. It was said to be the favourite air freshener of Queen Elizabeth I.
In what will become a running theme of our tour, the plant can also be used in alcohol, and was once commonly added to mead – hence its popular name, corrupted to suggest meadows.
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From there, by contrast, our tour moves on to a small forest of nettles, a plant more famous for inflicting pain although, as Kavanagh tells us, it can also relieve it. The many properties of nettles include being a natural antihistamine. It has also long been used to treat arthritis and back pain.
Free food aside, part of the reason Kavanagh forages is the therapeutic effect of losing herself in the exercise, fresh air and scenery
Not far from Aughrim, once, St Kevin is said to have rolled naked in nettle beds. Church lore says this was a form of self-chastisement, and that he also used clumps of the plant as a defence against a non-medical problem: the advances of an amorous woman. But perhaps he was aware of the scientific benefits too.
Kavanagh can handle nettles with apparent impunity; “my hands are toughened from work”, she explains. But when we find an especially fresh-looking bunch later, Justinia, a Polish woman on the tour, goes one better: rolling some up in a ball and eating them.
“Sweet,” she declares them. So our guide tries some too but finds them “quite stingy” and doesn’t fully recommend the experience, especially since in rare cases nettles can cause anaphylactic reaction.
Free food aside, part of the reason Kavanagh forages is the therapeutic effect of losing herself in the exercise, fresh air and scenery. You can see her point when we climb out of the town along a steep but beautiful narrow country road – formerly known as “the pure mile” but now called “Jim’s Way” after a late stalwart of the local (and All-Ireland-winning) Tidy Towns Committee.
From the top, there are staggering views across the valley, towards Croghan Mountain. There is gold in that there hill, it seems. Nuggets were discovered in the 1790s and you could still probably find a bit in the river today, Kavanagh says, making us wonder briefly if we’re on the wrong tour.
In quick succession, four giant tractors, with equally wide trailers and balers, trundle by, forcing us to retreat to the grass margins
In the meantime, the richness of the hedgerows is enough to be going on with. There is food (and potential drink) everywhere around us, from sloes to Spanish chestnuts, beech nuts to rowan berries, acorns to elderberries.
At one point, the side of the road is carpeted with crab apples.
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“I hate walking by this and seeing it being driven over,” Kavanagh sighs. “But nobody in the town picks them. I’m always telling people about the apples, but nobody comes.”
Speaking of drivers, not a single car has passed us in an hour on the road. The weather is propelling local farmers into action, however, even on a Sunday morning. In quick succession, four giant tractors, with equally wide trailers and balers, trundle by, forcing us to retreat to the grass margins. The trailers have trimmed some of the hedges to their shape.
Never eat a wild plant unless you are 100 per cent sure of its identification
The view below includes the Wicklow county GAA pitch, where the Aughrim under-15 footballers are getting a bit of a trimming too, at the hands of Baltinglass. But leaving the hills behind, we descend to the banks of the Aughrim river for a picnic lunch beside the picturesque old stone bridge.
There follows a dark interlude of the tour wherein Kavanagh introduces us to the Hemlock Water Dropwort – aka “Dead Man’s Fingers” - some of which grows nearby. It looks harmless, and indeed is related to the carrot (a plant family “not for beginners”, our guide warns).
She uses a plastic bag just to hold it, remembering a time years ago when she handled some with unknowing carelessness and then probably put fingers to her mouth. A night of stomach pains, retching and alarmingly loud heartbeat ensued. No long-term harm resulted, but eating even small amounts would cause failure of the nervous system and death.
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That’s why, at number one on the list of ground rules on the leaflet she has given us, is this: “Never eat a wild plant unless you are 100 per cent sure of its identification.”
It is also why she recommends using at least one guidebook, and preferably two, to help with photo ID. She has a mini library of such guides herself, some of which she had introduced us to earlier.
Her tour finishes in the lovely Roddenagh Woods, through which you can walk to the neighbouring village of Annacurragh. Mushrooms are disappointingly few there – it’s the wrong weather.
But we do find fraughans – wild blueberries – fruit so abundant in Wicklow that, back in the early 1940s, locals made a lucrative living supplying tons of it to ration-starved England.
The fraughan may even have helped win the war. Pilots who ate jam made from it reportedly found it improved their night vision.
War winners or not, as the slogan on Kavanagh’s website wicklowwildfoods.com explains: “We are all the descendants of successful foragers.” To compensate for skills lost, she also sells tools for the modern gatherer, including baskets, foraging bags and mushroom knives.
Her tours are divided into three seasons: spring, summer, and autumn. The autumn ones will continue on weekends from now until late October, when Kavanagh’s poetry may give way to Keats’s, and mists and mellow fruitfulness – not to mention more mushrooms – can be expected.
