Don’t fall foul of the fool’s watercress

For so familiar and welcome a food as watercress, collecting it from the wild can easily become a lethal enterprise. Historically, there has always been the concern about the owner of the land on which it was growing taking exception and chasing the forager with threats of prosecution or, occasionally, a gun.

While the latter is, I hope, a thing entirely of the past, trespassing counts as a civil wrong and we are not to countenance it, especially as wild watercress is readily available without such resort. Nevertheless, perils still exist — and serious ones at that.

The first is