IT’S what newspapers call the silly season. So let’s settle this – ahem – thorny blackberry/bramble issue.

Of course, while it is thorny it’s not silly. Language is a key part of culture, and local or regional usage is something to be fostered, cherished and, when under threat, defended.

It’s astonishing to find readers of this newspaper, The Northern Echo, speaking up for "blackberry". I’m a Northern septuagenarian, born and raised on the Yorkshire side of the Tees. I’ll swear that until a year or two ago the word "blackberry" was virtually unknown to me. I had to think twice over what the fruit might be. Ah yes, the good old bramble – splendid name, charming yet strong. But "blackberry" – pitiful and characterless. If it comes from the south, well, that fits doesn’t it?

I grew up very much with brambles. Where I lived, on the Eston Hills, the surrounding fields were thickly bordered with bramble bushes. My father often picked enough for a pie on the short walk from the brickyard where he worked to our house. I was also sent out to gather, and, annually, a large party of friends and relatives assembled at our house for a mammoth afternoon’s "brambling". Everyone left with enough brambles not only for pies in the coming days but to make jam or jelly to last a year.

My wife and I still gather brambles. On our autumn holiday in the Lakes, my wife takes her home-made breadcrumbs and bakes crumbles with brambles that we gather at a quiet spot with marvellous views. No crumble ever tastes better.

Bramble patches wax and wane, and on our walks in the North York Moors we note potentially good brambling spots months ahead and return in season. Brambles freeze better than any other fruit and, Chez Mead, bramble-and-apple pie is a superb winter staple, best enjoyed in front of an open fire.

But this matter of the name. A Hear All Sides correspondent insists the bush is a "bramble" while the fruit is a "blackberry". Definitive – just like that.

Of course, "blackberry" is correct – boringly so, we "bramble" folk would say. But the richer word "bramble" is also correct, unless long usage of the term by millions of Britons means nothing.

We northerners have never gone "blackberrying", always "brambling". The Scots are with us here. Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem From a Railway Carriage – describing the rapid succession of sights – contains the couplet: “Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,/ All by himself and gathering brambles.”

How "blackberry" came to invade our Northern "bramble" patch is a puzzle. Perhaps it’s to do with supermarket labelling. Certainly supermarkets are to blame for the reduced awareness of another splendid wild fruit, the bilberry. Out on the moors, my wife and I pick these too. Among those who see us, it is becoming rarer for anyone to know what we are doing.

Heads nod when we explain that the bilberry is a relative of the American blueberry, familiar on supermarket shelves. For good measure we sometimes add that the bilberry, though smaller than the blueberry, is nutritionally superior. Even so, a teenager with a family that observed us picking this year commented “Ugh” when my wife said she made pies with our moorland harvest.