O'er moorland and brae: More to jam than berries

Wandering around some of the more rural villages in Perthshire we come across Pitcairgreen, a small village which only came into being in the 18th century when the local lord needed workers to operate the textile mill he was building. He set his factor about housing them in purpose-built semis and terraces neatly spaced around a large treed village green on the banks of the River Almond. The green was once a hub of activity where the workers bleached the textiles and hung it out to dry.

Today, even though the mill is long gone, these are delightful homes that will live on for centuries. A credit to m'lord.

But all over this region of Perthshire, something very similar, albeit different, is happening today. Fields everywhere are heavily committed to fruits and crops like raspberries, strawberries, potatoes and maize. Acre after acre are newly planted, intensively planted. The fruit is under plastic arched tunnels low to the ground like glasshouses, similar to those we saw covering the fields of Netherlands last year: the vegetables in the open and ready to be boxed.

The fields look prosperous and well tended in the main. But the harvest must be phenomenal work. Massive numbers of boxes are stacked beside huge packing sheds all over the region in preparation for the ripening product and we see workers in the fields are checking their readiness.

These workers, we were told, are mainly Eastern Europeans. The locals, evidently, will not work for the harvest as it is probably not paid well enough. Recent news told us that only 1 in 400 fruit pickers are British. Hourly pay runs around £7-£8 per hour though up to £11 for overtime. Today, the local farmer, as in the days of the textile mill, finds he has to import labour to get his product to market, but to do that he has to provide housing for them. As in days of yore.

We saw an example of this housing one evening while hunting down an elusive farm campsite where we hoped to spend the night. From the road we could see what looked like caravans parked together so we thought this, finally, might be our farm campsite. It wasn't. An entire field had been given over to what looked like winter storage of static caravans, but to our horror, we found they weren't being stored. They were stacked side by side, and higgledy-piggledy, all over the yard, hooked up to power, and used as housing for the imported farm labourers. Year after year after year, so they were not so temporary.

And this is just one property, and one set of workers. Sometimes a farmer has up to 80 workers at a time housed in these statics. And all over this part of the country similar things are happening each year. This type of housing is bleak and sad and awful: we are surprised under health regulations it is allowed in such intensity. But how times have changed. And how very ugly these worker's homes.

It really makes me rethink the preserves we have recently bought. Made of fresh berries: raspberries, strawberries and black currants, plucked straight from these very Scottish fields last summer, and brought to a preserved state using the traditional recipe and large copper vats, as in days long past. It makes us aware that there is so much more to jam than berries.