Blairgowrie Raspberries: The Berry Fields of Strathmore

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The scale of production has varied over the decades, and claims that the area was "the largest" raspberry-growing area in the world at its peak are common but hard to verify, so this card says "one of the major" regions.

The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) is a reference work by Alan Davidson and others. Its botany and word history are used here as reference facts. Its figure that 90 per cent of Scotland's fine crop is eaten in Britain is undated and should be read as a picture of the trade before 2014, not a current statistic. Where it says an origin is uncertain, this card labels it shared.

The fruit

established Not quite a berry. The raspberry, Rubus idaeus, belongs to the rose family, in the same genus as the blackberry and cloudberry. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) explains that it is technically an "etaerio of druplets", a cluster of small stone fruits growing on a core called the receptacle. The difference from a blackberry lies in that core. A picked blackberry keeps its core inside; a picked raspberry comes away and leaves a white cone on the plant. That is why a raspberry is hollow, softer and juicier, and also why it bruises so easily and had to reach the jam boilers or the market quickly.

established A northern plant. The common European wild raspberry grows well north of the Arctic Circle and across western and northern Asia, in red, yellow and white forms. The Companion notes that the flavour of some wild plants is so good that canes were often dug up and moved into gardens. Wild raspberries were common in Scotland, as McNeill's sources show (see below), so the commercial fields of Strathmore were growing a native plant in a climate it already liked.

established The name. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder said the Greeks called the plant idaeus because it grew thickly on Mount Ida, which survives in the modern botanical name. The old English name was "raspis", and Scots still speaks of "rasps". Another old name, hindberry, came from the fruit being eaten by deer.

shared The Companion says the origin of "raspis" is obscure. It is thought to refer to the rough, slightly hairy, "rasping" surface of the fruit compared with a shiny blackberry, but that is a likely explanation, not a proven one.

The berry fields

established In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, farmers around Blairgowrie, Coupar Angus and the wider Strathmore valley planted raspberries on a large scale. The soils, cool summers and long daylight hours suited the fruit, which ripened slowly and developed strong flavour. The area became one of the major raspberry-growing regions in the world.

Jam and markets

established Much of the crop was sold to jam makers, including firms in Dundee, and raspberries were sent to markets across Britain by rail. Later, freezing and processing expanded the market.

established The folklorist F. Marian McNeill, in The Scots Kitchen (1929; revised 1963), credits "the native sweetness of the strawberries and raspberries, which ripen slowly in mild sunshine" for the excellence of Scottish jams, the same slow-ripening explanation growers give today. She offers older context too. Wild raspberries were common: Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus, as quoted by McNeill, remembered that around 1812 "cranberries and raspberries ran over the country". Home jam-making had spread from gentry kitchens to ordinary households by the 1780s, as John Galt's Annals of the Parish describes for Ayrshire, once cheap West Indian sugar and garden berry bushes came together. Big houses also made raspberry vinegar, a cordial. Among dishes, McNeill suggests a few handfuls of raspberries "buried in a bowl of cream-crowdie", the forerunner of modern cranachan.

Before the berry fields

established The food historian Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), traces the cultivated raspberry in Scotland back to the gentry garden. John Reid's The Scots Gard'ner (1683), a gardening manual written for Scottish conditions, lists raspberries among "the only Fruits for this Country", with apples, pears, cherries, plums, currants and gooseberries. In 1735 the agricultural improver John Cockburn of Ormiston urged the father of his gardener to grow raspberries for sale, predicting that the local publican would take more than he could raise to make raspberry brandy, that Edinburgh apothecaries would buy quantities, and that gentlemen who liked them in punch at the inn would buy the fruit to use at home (as quoted by Hope). Hope's own recipe for the brandy, from old sources, steeps 4 lb of raspberries in 3 quarts of brandy for a month before filtering and sweetening it.

established Cheap sugar spread the habit of preserving. In Hope's account, cottagers on longer leases planted gooseberries, raspberries and currants at the end of the eighteenth century, and the people of Dumfries were noted for their raspberry jam. Agricultural reporters encouraged home-made fruit wines; the Reverend John Smith, writing on Argyll, recommended raspberries and strawberries to give such wines colour and flavour. Meg Dods's raspberry jam, which Hope prints, used four parts raspberries to one of redcurrant juice, with an equal weight of sugar.

established Wild fruit mattered too. Hope quotes the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, remembering great stretches of wild raspberry canes in the Langfall and other woods on the Duke of Buccleuch's estate near Langholm, where the public was allowed to pick.

established Steam transport turned soft fruit into a commercial crop. Hope writes that improved packing and marketing raised demand through the nineteenth century, and that by 1880 Perthshire and Angus were celebrated for their raspberries, while strawberries were the main horticultural product of Clydeside. That date fits the late-nineteenth-century start of commercial growing given above.

shared Hope described Scotland as the largest exporter of raspberries within the European Union, as her text puts it, and credited the Scottish Crop Research Institute with the Tayberry and Tummelberry. She also recorded the growers' view that raspberries and strawberries survived as commercial crops, where blackcurrants and gooseberries had become unprofitable without cheap picking labour, because of their export market and the pick-your-own system. Those are figures and judgements of the 1980s, before the polytunnel era, and should not be read as current.

Berry pickin'

established Raspberry picking required huge numbers of seasonal workers. For decades, families from Dundee, Glasgow and other towns spent their summer holidays picking berries, earning money and enjoying a working holiday. Scottish Travellers came in large numbers and camped in the fields. The Traveller singer Belle Stewart, from Blairgowrie, wrote "The Berryfields o' Blair", describing the gathering of pickers from all walks of life.

Glen varieties

established Plant breeders at the Scottish Crop Research Institute at Invergowrie, near Dundee, developed raspberry varieties with "Glen" names, including Glen Clova and Glen Ample, which became widely grown in Britain and abroad. The institute is now part of the James Hutton Institute.

established Hybrids. Raspberries and blackberries can be crossed. The best-known hybrid, the loganberry, was an accident found in a Californian garden in 1881. The Oxford Companion to Food records two much more recent hybrids of similar parentage, the Tayberry and the Tummelberry, each named for a river in the east of Scotland. Their names tie them to the same Tayside fruit country as the Glen raspberries.

Other Scottish berries

established Blaeberries. The wild bilberry, Vaccinium myrtillus, is a northern fruit of moor and woodland. The Companion notes its Scots name, blaeberry, from "blae", a north-country and Scots word for blue, and the name whinberry, because it grows among whins, the Scots word for gorse. The berries grow sparsely, and picking a large quantity is tiring work.

established Grossets. Scots called the gooseberry the "grosset" or "grosart". The Companion quotes the Victorian writer E. S. Dallas (1877): "The Scotch, it must be remembered are great in gooseberries." Dallas repeated an old joke that in treeless Shetland, readers of Genesis could only picture Adam hiding under a grosset bush.

shared Cranachan. The Companion describes cranachan as originally a harvest festival version of crowdie, a simple oatmeal gruel, made with coarser oatmeal and with cream in place of water or buttermilk. It became prominent as a dessert only in the later twentieth century. The basic modern version is lightly toasted oatmeal and whipped cream, sweetened with honey or sugar, with fresh raspberries folded in or served alongside. Whisky, it notes, belongs mainly to restaurant versions. This matches McNeill's earlier suggestion of raspberries "buried in a bowl of cream-crowdie".

shared Annette Hope adds that cranachan was once indispensable at Harvest Home, and that G. W. Lockhart, in The Scot and His Oats, says it was served at Hallowe'en with small charms hidden in it. Asking whether whisky or fruit came first, she suggests that if fruit, the raspberry fields of Angus and Fife may be its true home. That is a speculation, and she preferred the simplest version, without honey.

Today

established Raspberries are still grown around Blairgowrie, often in polytunnels that extend the season, alongside strawberries and blueberries. Much of the picking is now done by seasonal workers from abroad, and the availability of such labour has become a political issue.

• Blairgowrie was a centre of raspberry growing.
• Families spent summer holidays picking berries.
• Belle Stewart wrote "The Berryfields o' Blair".
• Glen Ample was bred near Dundee.
• Raspberries were sent to Dundee's jam makers.
• A picked raspberry leaves its core on the cane, which is why it is hollow.
• "Hindberry", an old name for the raspberry, came from deer eating the fruit.
• The Tayberry and Tummelberry are named after Scottish rivers.
• "Blae" in blaeberry is the Scots word for blue.

• Disputed: Blairgowrie as the world's largest raspberry-growing area. The claim is common but hard to verify, so the safest description is one of the major regions.
• Disputed: The Companion's 90 per cent figure. It says 90 per cent of the finest Scottish crop is eaten in Britain, but the figure is undated and reflects the trade before 2014, not a current statistic.
• Disputed: Where "raspis" comes from. The Companion calls the origin obscure. A reference to the fruit's rough, "rasping" surface is likely but not proven.
• Myth: Whisky is a traditional ingredient of cranachan. Cranachan began as a harvest dish of oatmeal and cream. Whisky belongs mainly to restaurant versions.
• Disputed: Hope's 1987 export ranking and her view of which soft fruits paid. These are figures and judgements of the 1980s, before the polytunnel era, and should not be read as current.
• Disputed: Cranachan beginning in the raspberry fields of Angus and Fife. Hope suggests it, but it is speculation.