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.
Ginny Slade, who has completed the training, said she found there was something therapeutic about scything.
“You need a level of physical fitness but it’s also about enthusiasm and the passion to learn heritage skills,” she said. “It’s a repetitive movement. You find your rhythm and zone into it. You can really connect with the meadow, the landscape.”
The first volunteers have also found that using the scythe is something of a sensual treat – the sound of the blade cutting, the scent of the meadow.
Slade said: “Scything is a wonderful example of how traditional skills can still have a role in addressing modern challenges. We hope to help create the diverse, flower-rich habitats that pollinators need while also preserving knowledge and skills that have shaped our landscapes.”
Slade, a volunteer and community engagement manager with English Heritage, is one of the first to be trained by professionals at the Exmoor National Park Authority in the art of using and maintaining a scythe. “You want a really good scythe,” said Slade. “If you look after them, they can last generations.”
English Heritage rewards volunteers with bread and cheese (it also thought about providing West Country cider but thought this was not a good idea on health and safety grounds).
The first group of scythers will help care for the meadow at Muchelney Abbey, in Somerset, which was once a wealthy and important monastery with features including a thatched two-storey monks’ lavatory, which is unique in Britain.
They will work on a three-year project with the Bumblebee Conservation Trust to improve habitat for the shrill carder bee, a species that has declined significantly because of the loss of flower-rich grasslands.
As part of the project, English Heritage volunteers have been trained by the bumblebee trust to carry out wildlife surveys.
Rather than simply recording numbers, volunteers will monitor the relationship between bees and the meadow ecosystem, including which flowers are in bloom, which plants they are using, how far bees travel from their nests and how the habitat changes over time.
Hardy wrote about scything in prose and poetry: in Far From the Madding Crowd, Bathsheba Everdene watches haymaking, and the farm hand Mark Clark is described as “humming a tune to the strokes of his scythe”.
In his poem Four in the Morning, Hardy wrote about the “to-and-fro/Wheezed whettings of a scythe apace”.
The meadow at Muchelney is one of 100 that English Heritage pledged to create and enhance to mark the coronation of King Charles in 2023.
Slade said Muchelney was the pilot site but the idea was for the volunteers to travel to other English Heritage sites to use their skills. “We’re really at the beginning of this journey, but we’re very excited about it.”
