The Púca's Blackberry Night

Cormac Deane
Field Correspondent, The Isles & the Otherworld

Fieldnotes — the Irish hedgerows, late October

There is a rule, still repeated in parts of Ireland without much ceremony, that you do not eat blackberries after Samhain. Ask why and the answer comes back plain: the Púca has been at them. Some say it spits on the fruit. Some say it is coarser than that, and uses the berries the way an animal marks a boundary. The versions disagree on the method and agree completely on the result. After the thirty-first of October, or in some tellings after the eleventh of November, the old Samhain by the unreformed calendar, the bramble is finished for the season, and whatever hangs on it after that night is the Púca's and not yours.

The Púca itself resists a tidy description, which seems to be the point of it. It is called a goblin, a hobgoblin, a spirit, sometimes simply an it. It shifts shape with no fixed preference: a black horse with eyes like coals, a goat, a hare, an eagle, occasionally something that walks on two legs and talks. In parts of Munster and Connacht it was known to carry a rider off at terrific speed through the night and set them down again at dawn, shaken but unharmed, somewhere far from home. Elsewhere it is milder, more a nuisance than a menace, the sort of spirit blamed for a spoiled churn or a gate left open.

What holds the stories together is timing. The Púca belongs to the turn of the year, to the stretch when the harvest is in, or ought to be, and the boundary between the visible world and whatever lies behind it is said to thin. Samhain marked the end of the pastoral year in the old reckoning, the last gathering in before winter shut the land down. Crops left in the field past that point were understood to be forfeit, not through any practical rot but because they now belonged to something else. In some districts a final portion of the harvest, a share of corn or potatoes, was deliberately left unharvested and called the Púca's share, an offering as much as an excuse.

The blackberry prohibition reads like the last, smallest version of that same old bargain. Nobody I have spoken to treats it with much solemnity. It is told the way a grandmother tells a child not to eat something, with a shrug and a half-smile, and yet it persists, repeated into supermarket aisles and school playgrounds long after anyone could say with confidence who or what the Púca actually is. That durability is its own kind of evidence. A great deal of seasonal lore has been argued over by folklorists for a century, its origins pagan or Christian or both or neither, and the Púca sits comfortably inside that argument without resolving it. What survives is the instruction, not the explanation.

I think of it each year around this time, walking hedgerows that are, by then, mostly bare, the good fruit taken, a few shrivelled berries left high on the cane. Halloween has moved past the point where it means much beyond costumes and sweets for most people who keep it, and Samhain further still, a word some know and most do not. But the bramble keeps the old calendar whether anyone is counting or not, and so, it seems, does whatever walks it after dark.

Cormac Deane is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Isles & the Otherworld. Passage tombs, place-names, and the long argument between them; a habit of reading the landscape through the Irish in it, and of pointing out where a translation has quietly invented a story the original never told.

The rest of the season is gathered in Nights of the Dead.