One weekend, back in late August, we went on a beautiful family walk in our nearby, Devilla Forest. The weather recently has been great, and we needed to get out on a walk, so we decided to visit again! (Previous trips – click here). With the promise of afternoon tea at the end, and an exciting walk, we set out – and began walking towards our first Geocache. As we searched, I began to notice something about our surrounding undergrowth – everywhere I looked – I saw blaeberries (aka billberries, essentially mini blueberries) growing in their hundreds or thousands – far more on each bush than I have normally seen! So we started collecting!! Very soon we noticed that one: we would hundreds of them to do anything, and two: they were staining our makeshift hankie-bag bright pink!

There are at least 20 blaeberries in this photo – the camera doesn’t make them obvious though – and they are easy to miss!
As well as our blaeberry collection, we were also after geocaches, and we found a lot of them – last year we found our 100th geocache on August —-, and we aimed to find a further hundred before then this year. After succeeding that challenge, we have set our target to 200 this year – approximately 4 a week! But the extra caches we collected, including the ones we found in Devilla – have brought our target down to 3.5 a week for the rest of the year.
On our way to Loch Moor, we really enjoyed the trees, the undergrowth, the bird calls in the distance – and this weird thing in a hole in the ground!! None of us are sure what it is, possibly an abandoned bee hive – or an insect mound? Along our walk we also ate some of the wild raspberries along the side of the path – it all felt very different to some other forests, because other than the path – it was just untouched wild forest. After around an hour of walking, we had reached the loch – but we didn’t feel like going all the way around – so after something to eat, we returned by a slightly different route. Then, after finally making it back after our 10km walk, we had some afternoon tea at the walled garden, before heading home.
Once we got home, we weighed our blaeberries – and we got the value of around 150 grams. We then weighed 10 berries, and calculated we had 300 berries (each one is about 5mm wide!) – and began our jam! And tasting the jam was (at least for me) a great end to our family day out!