THERE’S no escaping it – scything is big this summer.

After Aidan Turner’s now-infamous topless scything scene in the BBC’s Poldark, everyone wants to get in on the action.

And whether you want to trim your wildflower meadow, get fit or just learn a new skill, in Oxfordshire there is one man who can help - Clive Leeke.

A scything seer for seven years, he has now trained his 1,000th student.

As one of a very small number of experts in the scything world, Mr Leeke was doing it before it was cool.

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He helped train a cast of “Russian peasants” on Salisbury Plain who can be seen in the opening scenes of the 2012 Jude Law and Keira Knightley film of Anna Karenina.

And when the internet nearly broke over Aidan Turner hysteria, he was bombarded with calls from journalists wanting to find out more about this traditional country craft.

The 62-year-old said: “The middle of April was just madness, there was one morning I had several BBC producers looking for interviews.

“Me and my colleagues did about 20 different interviews with different papers.”

Mr Leeke’s website, austrianscythes.co.uk, normally gets a healthy 25 hits a day but the day after the Poldark episode aired, he had 417.

Most of the articles which appeared in the following days were full of withering critiques of Aidan Turner’s scything technique, saying he was using too much force and not enough skill.

But Mr Leeke, a father-of-one, sympathised: “I think it was fitting for the scene that he was taking his frustration out.”

But whereas Turner was using a traditional English scythe, Mr Leeke is a practitioner on the more lightweight, easier-to-use Austrian version.

Husband to Vernoica, he was a hedgelayer for some 20 years when he went to Somerset to learn to scythe seven years ago, where he said he thought: “This could be ready for a revival”.

The course was run by Austrian scythe practitioner Simon Fairlie. At the time he was importing about 200 Austrian scythes a year – it is now closer to 8,000.

Mr Leeke adopted scything into his business, and now works for people who have wildflower meadows.

Mr Leeke’s next open scything course will be on Saturday, July 4 with the Earth Trust. Find out more at earthtrust.org.uk