It sounds like something out of a Thomas Hardy novel: a merry band of men and women roaming the West Country cutting meadows by hand in exchange for hunks of bread and cheese.

But the conservation charity English Heritage is recruiting a team of volunteer scythers to maintain 21st-century meadowland in the old-fashioned way.

The first scythers have been trained and will use their new skills in the meadows around an abbey in Somerset, where it is hoped that as well as helping to keep the age-old practice alive, they will protect a rare type of bumblebee.