I open the cottage door to blindingly white summer light, shopping basket in hand.

Turning left down the lane, it’s an abrupt right at the junction, up the rise of Town Side, past the manor house on the mount, strolling to the butchers.

Alone on my early morning journey, with birdsong and distant lowing of cattle my only companions, I arrive at the rough-hewn, age-old brick emporium.

So immediate is its catchment, the butcher needs no sign to attract trade. All here know where to come for his heavenly Lincolnshire sausages, bursting with knobbly chunks of home-reared meat, crumbling to pieces in the frying pan.

Already relishing the prospect of breakfast with plate-size mushrooms picked from grandma’s orchard to compliment the sage singing to my senses as those sausages sizzle contentedly, I’m shocked into the present by someone moving to my left after I say my goodbyes to the butcher.

I’ve sometimes seen this man during the family’s month-long stay here each year and have grown to witness his work with admiration and intrigue.

It’s Mr Spittalhouse – I only ever knew him as that, such was the formality then between townspeople like me and `home-growners` like him.

Polite he always was – respectful almost – with a sense of “I know my place in the scheme of life”, and at peace with that `balance`, I thought.

With imperfect memory stretching back more than 50 years, I recall him as aged, gnarled and wrinkled, a “salt of the earth” as yesteryear’s condescending labels dictated.

More than likely he was in his 40s, with a complexion turned nutty from years working outdoors in this flat, often windswept, corner of Lincolnshire countryside nestled near the Humber estuary.

His work – the aspect of it that I happened on – seemed simplicity itself, to keep clear the many dykes lining local country lanes and roads. Summer spurting growth of grass and weeds would soon clog the channels so key to land drainage in this agriculturally rich stretch of Britain.

As a timid teenager, I watched spellbound from afar as he unlocked his shed by the laneside, disappeared for a moment to reappear with the object of my fascination in hand – his scythe.

I’d watch as he used his whetting stone to sharpen the scimitar blade – first one side then the other, in a smooth, gliding action perfected with years of practice.

He’d usually amble off in the other direction to his first job of the day but sometimes Town Side was his early focus and he’d begin swishing the blade in a huge swathe, expertly holding the rounded handles, polished smooth by his grasp.

Shirtsleeves neatly rolled up just above his elbows, the `meisterscyther` stooped slightly to his task, flat cap anchored in place to shield his gaze from glare.

I’d hear the crisp cut of the razored steel leading edge as it felled the upstanding stalks and tangled undergrowth. Before him was a mass of confusion, behind him clean, flat carpeting cut to the quick to reveal the steeply banked water channel.

So miraculous was the transformation, here was the instant answer to all that confusion in the verges. How long it would stay that way I didn’t care to ponder but for now all I knew was that Mr Spittalhouse had brought order to a tangled world of weeds, briers, cow parsley and couch grass.

Deep in the well of the dyke, the run-off water trickled slowly passed my standpoint, free to flow away to larger channels.

Today, when I spy modern monster tractors hauling elaborate attachments relentlessly carving their way along road verges to leave a dishevelled trail of destruction in their wake – such a far cry from that ordered carpet of carved growth I recall from so long ago – I summon to mind Mr Spittalhouse and his craft.

Today has no time nor I suspect inclination to return to a rural skill like his – too many miles of disorderly verges to destroy, too many tasks to complete in the day, with passion for the job pressed out.

How heartening then to hear of the return of scything as a country craft worth resurrecting. The National Trust has introduced the practice on some of its properties to clear meadows ready for reseeding.

Then there are those who simply love the clean precision of the process and others who rightly see scything as a fine example of the green gym in full flow – an exercise and artform enacted in a single swing.

Welcome back. I can revisit my memories in the full sunshine of optimism rather than with cloudy despair at yet another sad loss of a cherished gem of rural England.