#hedgerow-folklore — Public Fediverse posts

The MT Almanac – September ’26

September always feels like a month caught in the act of becoming something else.

It can begin in summer. There may still be warm afternoons, bees lumbering drunkenly through the last flowers and washing that dries on the line before you have remembered you put it out there. Yet somewhere between the first and last days of the month, something changes.

You notice it first in the mornings. There is a chill beneath the warmth. Dew hangs heavier on the grass. The light has altered, becoming lower and somehow more golden, and the shadows stretch a little further across the garden than they did a few weeks ago. Then one evening you look out of the window at half past seven and realise it is getting dark.

Autumn has arrived without knocking.

September takes its name from the Latin ‘septem’, meaning seven, because it was once the seventh month of the Roman calendar before January and February found their places at the beginning of the year. The name survived the rearrangement, leaving us with the slightly ridiculous situation in which September, October, November and December — seven, eight, nine and ten — are now months nine, ten, eleven and twelve.

Our ancestors, naturally, were rather less interested in what number somebody in Rome had assigned to the month than in what was happening outside their doors.

And in September, quite a lot is happening. This is harvest time. Fields that stood green at the beginning of summer have turned gold and been cut. Apples hang heavily from branches. Hazel nuts ripen in the hedgerows. Elderberries darken almost to black. Rosehips shine scarlet among the leaves, and brambles are laden with blackberries.

For generations, this abundance represented something far more important than an opportunity to make a nice crumble. Winter was coming. What could be gathered, dried, stored, pickled, brewed or preserved now might determine how comfortably a household survived the cold months ahead. The harvest therefore carried an urgency that is difficult to appreciate when our own winter preparations generally involve turning up the thermostat and wondering whether we have enough teabags.

The hedgerows were a second pantry. Blackberries are perhaps the most familiar September harvest, although folklore warns against leaving them too long.

Across Britain and Ireland there are variations of the story that after a particular autumn date the Devil – or, in some traditions, the Púca or Phooka – spoils the remaining berries. Depending upon where the story is told, the offending supernatural creature spits upon them, stamps on them or otherwise renders them unfit to eat.

The date varies too, often falling around Michaelmas or Old Michaelmas Day.

There is actually a sensible observation lurking beneath the supernatural warning. As autumn advances, blackberries become increasingly vulnerable to mould, insects and miserable weather. Folklore simply supplied a memorable reason why sensible people ought to stop eating shrivelled fruit from a wet October hedge.

September’s hedgerows are full of other treasures. Elderberries ripen in heavy clusters. Hawthorn berries redden. Rosehips appear among increasingly tired leaves. Sloes begin their transformation from hard green fruit into the familiar dark blue-black berries of autumn, although traditionally many people wait until after the first frost before gathering them. Hazelnuts are ripening too, provided the squirrels haven’t got there first.

And beneath our feet another harvest is beginning.

Fungi emerge as temperatures cool and moisture returns to the ground. Puffballs, brackets, boletes and an extraordinary assortment of mushrooms can appear almost overnight.

Admire them freely. Photograph them enthusiastically. Attempt identification if you enjoy it. Do not, however, assume that something is edible because somebody on Facebook says their grandmother used to fry them in butter.

September also brings one of Britain’s most noticeable annual wildlife phenomena.

The spiders move in. Or at least, that is how it appears.

Those enormous house spiders suddenly galloping across carpets and appearing in baths have generally not invaded from outside at all. Many have been quietly sharing the building with us for months. What changes in late summer and early autumn is their behaviour. Mature males begin wandering in search of females. Unfortunately, their search routes occasionally cross the living-room floor at precisely the moment somebody is watching television. This explains why September produces an apparently impossible number of spiders with legs approximately three feet long.

Outside, orb-weaving spiders become increasingly conspicuous, their webs made spectacular by autumn dew. On cool mornings, entire hedges can suddenly reveal themselves to be threaded with silk. Look closely before brushing through one.

September is also a month of departures.

Swallows and house martins begin gathering before their long migration south. For centuries their disappearance puzzled observers. Before migration was properly understood, various theories attempted to explain where these familiar summer birds went. One surprisingly persistent idea held that swallows spent winter submerged in mud beneath ponds and lakes.

They do not. They are doing something considerably more impressive: travelling thousands of miles towards Africa. Their gathering on telephone wires and rooftops remains one of the loveliest signs that summer is ending.

Other animals are preparing for winter rather than escaping it. Hedgehogs feed voraciously, building reserves before hibernation. Jays become busy collecting acorns. Grey squirrels bury food with the optimistic assumption that they will remember where they put it. They do not always remember. Fortunately for the trees, forgotten caches occasionally become new woodland.

And then there are the deer.

As September progresses, the first stirrings of the autumn rut can begin among some species, with the more dramatic red deer rut generally becoming associated with the weeks ahead. Woodland that seemed quiet during summer starts to sound rather different once large antlered animals begin shouting at one another in the darkness.

Probably best admired from a respectful distance.

Above all this activity, September 2026 has a particularly lovely sky waiting for us.

The Moon reaches its third quarter on 4 September, disappears into the new Moon on the 11th and reaches first quarter on the 18th. Then, on 26 September, comes the full Moon.

And this one is the Harvest Moon.

The Harvest Moon is not simply another traditional name arbitrarily assigned to September’s full Moon. Properly speaking, it is the full Moon occurring closest to the autumn equinox.

Around the time of the Harvest Moon, the geometry of the Moon’s orbit means that, at northern latitudes, successive moonrises occur unusually close together. Historically, that extended period of evening light could be genuinely useful to farmers bringing in the harvest.

In 2026, the Moon reaches full phase at 5.49pm BST on Saturday 26 September. And it has company. Saturn will appear close to the Harvest Moon that night and will itself be approaching opposition in early October, making late September an excellent time to look for the ringed planet. No telescope required to see Saturn itself – it appears to the naked eye as a bright, steady point of light – although you will need optical help if you want to see those famous rings.

A few days earlier comes the moment around which the whole month seems to turn.

At 1.06am BST on Wednesday 23 September, the autumn equinox occurs.

At the equinox, the Sun crosses the celestial equator and the Earth’s northern and southern hemispheres receive approximately equal illumination. You will often hear that equinox means a day on which daylight and darkness are exactly twelve hours each.

Not quite.

The word derives from Latin words meaning “equal” and “night”, but atmospheric refraction and the way sunrise and sunset are measured mean the actual day of equal daylight and darkness does not necessarily fall precisely on the astronomical equinox.

Still, something important has happened. From here, in Britain, darkness wins a little more ground every day until the winter solstice.

Perhaps that is why this point in the year feels so much like a threshold.

The blazing abundance of summer is still around us, but decay has begun at its edges. Leaves yellow. Seed heads replace flowers. Apples fall. Fields become stubble. Nothing is quite dead, but nothing is quite as alive as it was. September sits between the two.

Our ancestors watched the month carefully for clues about what winter might bring, and British weather lore is full of attempts to read the coming season in the landscape.

An abundance of berries is still frequently said to predict a hard winter, as though hawthorn, holly and rowan somehow know what January has planned.

They don’t.

Heavy berry crops are generally responses to conditions that have already happened – favourable flowering, pollination and growing conditions – rather than botanical long-range weather forecasts. The same applies to many claims involving thick onion skins, abundant acorns and unusually woolly animals. They are wonderful folklore, but they are considerably less reliable than the Met Office.

But weather lore was never entirely foolish. Before forecasts arrived on phones, generations of people who worked outdoors became extraordinarily attentive to changes in wind, cloud, animal behaviour and air pressure. Some traditional observations contain perfectly sound meteorology wrapped inside rhyme and superstition. September therefore became a month for watching.

Mist.

Dew.

Spider webs.

The direction of the wind.

How quickly leaves were turning.

Whether birds were gathering.

How heavy the hedges were with fruit.

People were reading the landscape because, in a very practical sense, their lives depended upon understanding it.

Towards the end of the month comes one of the great old turning points of the British year. 29 September is Michaelmas, the Feast of St Michael and All Angels.

Today it passes largely unnoticed outside churches, universities and a handful of surviving traditions, but Michaelmas was once a significant date in the calendar. It was one of the traditional quarter days in England and Wales, when rents were paid, contracts settled and servants hired. Agricultural agreements frequently ran from Michaelmas to Michaelmas, making the day not simply a religious feast but an important administrative marker in rural life.

And Michaelmas had a bird. The goose.

Geese fattened on the stubble left after harvest were traditionally eaten at Michaelmas, and the custom became tangled with ideas of prosperity. Eating Michaelmas goose was said in some traditions to protect the household from financial want during the coming year.

There is a familiar story that Queen Elizabeth I was eating goose when news arrived of the defeat of the Spanish Armada and thereafter ordered goose to be served on Michaelmas. It is a lovely story. Unfortunately, like many lovely stories involving famous monarchs and convenient meals, its historical foundations are decidedly wobbly. Goose was associated with Michaelmas long before Elizabeth’s supposed dinner.

Far more interesting is the connection between the bird, harvest and rent. A tenant arriving to settle accounts with a well-fed goose for the landlord probably did himself no harm at all.

Michaelmas also belonged to St Michael the Archangel – warrior, protector and defeater of the dragon.

His feast arriving as the nights lengthened gave the day an additional resonance. The bright half of the year was closing. Darkness was coming. Protection mattered.

Even the landscape begins to feel different by Michaelmas. Those warm evenings at the beginning of September have become memories. The smell of damp leaves returns. Mornings can be misty enough to erase the end of a field. Conkers appear beneath horse chestnuts, glossy and impossibly satisfying to pick up. And somewhere in Britain somebody inevitably says:

“OOOh… There’s a proper autumn nip in the air.”

They will be correct.

So this September, notice it. Notice the first morning when your breath almost shows. Watch the spiders rebuilding their webs after rain. Look at the berries gathering in the hedges. Pick up a conker simply because you haven’t done it for years. Watch for swallows lining up before departure. Go outside after sunset on 14 September and look for the young crescent Moon near brilliant Venus. On the night of the 26th, find somewhere with a clear eastern horizon and watch the Harvest Moon rise with Saturn nearby.

And sometime around the equinox, stand outside as evening falls.

Don’t do anything particularly mystical. Just listen.

There is a point every year when the sound of an evening changes. The swifts have gone. The insects are quieter. Leaves move differently in the wind. Darkness arrives before you are expecting it. We have spent thousands of years surrounding this change with saints and spirits, harvest customs, weather signs, protective rituals and stories because human beings are extraordinarily good at noticing thresholds.

September is one of them.

Summer does not end with a slammed door. It retreats through the hedgerows, one blackberry, one swallow and one shortening evening at a time.

And by the time we finally notice it has gone, autumn is already standing in its place.