Plenty of Scots over fifty, asked what they did in the summer holidays, will say "the berries".

For most of the twentieth century the raspberry fields around Blairgowrie, Alyth and Coupar Angus needed thousands of pickers every July and August. They came by bus and by train, for a day or for the whole season, and were paid by the weight of what they picked. Children earned their first wages there. Families from Glasgow and Dundee made it their annual holiday. Travellers came from all over Scotland and camped beside the fields.

It lasted the best part of a century and most of it has gone. The fields are still there, less than an hour up the road from our farm in Kinross. This is about what happened in them, and about the river that connects them to one of our perfumes.

Anne Burgess / Berry pickers in the Carse of Gowrie / CC BY-SA 2.0

The berry toon

Raspberries had been grown around Blairgowrie in a small way for years. In 1895 a local solicitor, James Mackenzie Hodge, set up the Blairgowrie and Rattray Fruitgrowers Association so that growers could sell straight to the jam makers. Others bought land and planted. Within a decade there was far more fruit than local people could pick.

Most of it went for jam. The fruit was weighed at the end of the dreels (the rows), tipped into barrels and sent away to the preservers. Fresh fruit went on the Raspberry Special, loaded at Blairgowrie station in the late afternoon and at Covent Garden market by half past six the next morning.

Pickers had to be brought in and housed. In 1905 the growers at Essendy, three and a half miles from the town, built a camp of corrugated-iron dormitories that became known as Tin City. It had 48 dormitories for around a thousand people, with its own kitchens, shop, post office and chapel, and a matron in charge. Not everyone was housed like that. The same summer, a Blairgowrie grower was fined three guineas after an inspector found 29 pickers sleeping in a hut meant for three.

By the middle of the century the routine was settled. Berry buses collected pickers in Dundee and Perth each morning. Glasgow families came for their summer holidays and stayed in huts or under canvas. You tied a luggie (a small pail) round your waist with string, filled it, emptied it into a bucket, and carried the bucket to the weigh station at the foot of the dreel, where you were paid by the pound.

What people tend to remember is the plant more than the fruit. The canes were wet first thing and soaked your sleeves. The leaves smelled green and slightly sour when you bruised them. By the afternoon your hands were stained, your forearms were scratched, and the juice in the pail had gone warm.

The Travellers and the songs

For Scotland's Travellers the berries was one of the big gatherings of the year. Families who spent the other months apart, working their own districts, met at Blair in July. The Perthshire Traveller Sandy Stewart remembered them coming from the Black Isle, Aberdeenshire, Glasgow and Ayrshire, and the camp on the muir outside the town so full of tents and caravans that "hit wis like a toon".

Belle Stewart was born in 1906 in a bow tent on the bank of the Tay at Caputh, a few miles from Blairgowrie. Her husband Alex was a piper, and the family had berry fields that Travellers came from all over the country to pick. She wrote "The Berryfields o' Blair" about that gathering; accounts of the date run from the 1920s to 1947. The song lists who turns up: city folk, miners, fisherfolk, Travellers from the islands and the north, some of them making money and some not.

The song travelled faster than her name. In 1954 the folklorist Hamish Henderson, who was born in Blairgowrie himself, recorded it from John MacDonald of Pitgaveny, who had no idea who had written it. He asked Maurice Fleming, a young journalist from the town, to find out. Fleming found Belle.

Henderson spent the following summers in the berry camps with a tape recorder, for the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh. He found ballads being sung at the campfires that collectors thought had died out. He wrote that collecting there was "like holding a tin-can under the Niagara Falls". The Traveller writer Jess Smith, who met him at the berries, has said that without those recordings a large part of her people's history would have been lost with the people who carried it.

The Stewarts of Blair went on to sing across Europe and America, and in 1966 Blairgowrie held its first folk festival, out of which the Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland grew. Many of the field recordings can be heard free online at Tobar an Dualchais.

What changed

No single thing ended it. The muir where the Travellers camped was cleared in the early 1960s. The railway closed to freight in 1965. The Smedley's cannery in Blairgowrie shut in 1979. In the 1980s cheaper fruit from eastern Europe undercut the jam trade and root rot spread through the fields. The acreage fell.

The growers who carried on moved from jam fruit to fresh fruit for supermarkets. That meant polytunnels, a season running from June into the autumn, and berries picked carefully enough to sit in a punnet. Mechanical harvesters were developed for jam fruit, but fresh fruit under the tunnels is still picked by hand. But it is skilled work for months at a stretch, and the growers needed pickers who would stay. Those came mostly from eastern Europe, and more recently from further away, living in caravans on the farms.

The berry buses stopped. Local children stopped going.

Blairgowrie still grows very good fruit: raspberries, and now blueberries and cherries too. Anyone who thinks the old way was all singing should read the court report about the hut. But a gathering that brought a whole cross-section of Scotland into the same fields every summer has ended, and nothing has replaced it. Roger Leitch's book Going to the Berries: Voices of Perthshire and Angus Seasonal Workers collects the memories of people who were there, and is the place to start if this was your family.

"Raspberry Canes, Coupar Angus" by Trish Steel from Geograph is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Up the river

The berry fields lie in Strathmore, along the Ericht and the Isla. The Ericht runs into the Isla near Coupar Angus, and the Isla joins the Tay near Meikleour, a few miles downstream of the bank where Belle Stewart was born. Everything in this story drains into the one river.

Follow the Tay upstream from there and it takes you west through Dunkeld and Aberfeldy to Kenmore, where it runs out of Loch Tay. The loch is fifteen miles long. At the far end is Killin, and the river comes into the village over the Falls of Dochart: a wide run of broken rock under an old stone bridge, with the wooded island of Inchbuie in the middle.

The water has a different name there. The Tay is usually taken to rise on Ben Lui, near the Argyll border, and on the way down it is called the Cononish, then the Fillan, then the Dochart. It only becomes the Tay when it leaves the loch. So the falls at Killin are the upper Tay under another name, about ninety miles by water above Dundee.

The river has given its name to a berry as well. The tayberry, a cross between a raspberry and a blackberry, was bred at Invergowrie on the Tay estuary and released in 1979.

By Jean-Luc Toilet - https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeanluctoilet/2555288209/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5502112

Tay Berry

Our perfume Tay Berry is named for the Falls of Dochart. It takes the berries from the bottom of the river and the place from the top.

It opens with autumn berries and a little jasmine. Under that are Scots pine and clary sage, and the base is a mossy, wet-stone note. Raspberries give no usable essential oil, so the berry note in this or any perfume is built from other materials. We built ours to smell like fruit still on the cane, with the leaf and the stem in it, and kept it well away from jam.

The result is crisp and green and a little sweet. It is the freshest of our seven perfumes. To us it smells like a riverbank in September, with wet stone, pine needles and fruit on the bushes.

Tay Berry is £54 for 50 ml. A 2 ml sample is £4, and that £4 comes off a full bottle if you go on to buy one. Delivery is free within the UK.

If you or your family went to the berries, we would like to hear about it.

The "hero image" is attributed as follows: Andrew Diack / Falls of Dochart / CC BY-SA 2.0