We are lined up in two rows in a freezing village hall in Warwickshire celebrating the spring bean planting. Beside me are a retired publisher, an insurance salesman and an electrical engineer. We are wearing top hats and we carry broom handles.

Between dances, Paul Bryan, an air- traffic controller, voices his suspicion that “some people might laugh at what we do”.

Until this week I was one of those people. I regarded morris men as particularly ponderous cheerleaders. Then I heard the lament of the Morris Ring, the association that represents the traditional English dancing. Morris was dying, killed by the sneers of feckless young men like me.

To save it, young people needed to step forward. They might also be required to step backwards, to double-step, and to slap their thighs.

On Tuesday evening I attended a morris class in a basement studio at Cecil Sharp House in London, headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.

Others had answered the call that night. The regulars, two ladies in their sixties, had never seen so many new young faces. The air was soon thick with misdirected handkerchiefs and excitement, a feeling that a new age was dawning - a new era of Brithop.

“I'm just so excited to be given sticks,” said Deborah Newbold, 34, of North London. “I thought we might wait months for that.” Her husband, Alan, 35, was developing a strange hankering for bells.

Two truths became evident. It is very hard to step three times and then hop while waving one's arms, and it feels strange to kick a stranger in the shins, even during an ancient shepherd's jig. To progress as a morriser I felt that I needed to join a side.

I called the Hammersmith Morris Men, a group recommended by insiders for their very high capers. They were practising that night but one could no more expect to wander over and join in than one could wander into Old Trafford and expect to play for Manchester United.

Jeff Dent, 50, who works for London Underground, explained as much in a pub on the riverside where the Smiths were drinking after a thigh-cracking two-hour practice session.

“There is almost a professionalism about what we do,” he said. “We have had people come here for four years before they reach the standard where they can be given kit.”

In 1993 they resigned their membership of the Morris Ring. “We felt they weren't maintaining standards,” he said. “There was a lot of shoddy morris around.”

Such is the reputation of the Smiths - like the rock band, they have an affinity for all things morris-y - that they have no problem attracting new recruits. They did not need me.

The Ilmington Morris Men of Warwickshire, by contrast, were more willing to consider my credentials. “If you can stand up, you're in,” said Simon Barratt, 68, a retired publisher, as we lined up in the village hall.

They have one young chap who is only in his forties, but they desperately need more. “Trouble is,” said Keith Moule, a retired publican, “young people have so many interesting things to do these days.”

The Ilmington band consists of a blacksmith, who looks not unlike Brian Blessed and plays the fiddle, and two men on melodeons. Beside them, emerging from the middle of a wooden horse, is Peter Shadbolt, 77, jockey of the 110-year-old Ilmington Hobby Horse. The horse is skirted at the side to hide Mr Shadbolt's legs and he looked like a woman in a particularly elaborate ballgown.

After some light morris dancing we repaired to the group's headquarters, the Red Lion pub, where they told me the story of how the horse almost drowned during an international morris meeting aboard a paddle steamer on a lake in northern Denmark.

“Peter wasn't available so we had an amateur hobby-horse driver in,” Mr Barratt said.

“He had rather too much lager and got into an altercation with another morris side renowned for their rough-housing. They threw the hobby horse into the drink.”

In May the Ilmington men climb a hill in Warwickshire at 5.30am to dance in the sunrise beneath a large television mast. They cannot always see the sun rising but assume that, at 5.30am, it must be happening somewhere. They then drink schnapps.

So potent was the camaraderie, and the local bitter, that by the end of the night it was my fervent wish that one May morning I would be with them in a top hat beneath a TV mast, planting beans, drinking a Danish spirit and squinting into the mist for the sunrise.

Regional footwork

— Cotswolds morris dancers carry sticks and handkerchiefs; in the North West they wear clogs; Yorkshire sides use long, steel swords; groups from the Welsh border often wear black face paint and jackets covered in rags; rapper dancers in the North East carry sprung-steel swords with handles on each end

— In the 1970s, the formation of women's morris groups angered some. There is still disquiet over mixed sides - some traditionalists feel that it veers dangerously close to social folk dancing

— Morris dancing seldom leads to violence. Umbrage, however, is sometimes taken

— Thirty morris sides will gather today in Whittlesey, near Peterborough, for the annual Straw Bear Festival

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette