Foraging on bilberry hill

For bilberries and blackberries.

Look at these beauties! 

Will and I spent a morning in beautiful autumn sun up on bilberry hill in the lickey hills in Birmingham. 

I'd never been before and decided to explore as we dropped of my bezzy Jude at a conference in brum and were really near by. 

Ayls Fowler's lovely book 'the thrifty forager' had a page on bilberries with photos of bilberry hill and it had been on my mind to go there when we could.

It's such a beautiful place- views of the city on one side and of the countryside the other. 

It took a while for me to find the berries as they are so small and hide well beneath the leaves but once my eye was trained I found hundreds!

It's lovely meditative foraging- you have to get knee deep into the bushes and really poke around and feel your way. No thorns or prickles in this beautiful plant- maybe a spiders web or two.

Bilberries are really similar to the blueberries I've grown in the garden- smaller, an more bitter when raw but William loved them just the same.

We also found lots of blackberries- they made a tasty crumble with the apples scrumped  from my friends garden.

We found a secret fairy door in a random tree- I was so excited- William indifferent! Ha ha- we couldn't open the door- guess we didn't have a fairy key!

He left some cones he found for the fairy folk and carried on picking his berries and chasing around in the woodlands.

We also found a fairy toadstool! 

What a magical morning- I think the fairy folk are doing a grand job of protecting and nurturing this beautiful place- and the park rangers probably help them out too!