If mowing the lawn seems like a chore, then spare a thought for the army of workers who trim the country's roadside grass verges.

New figures have revealed the crews maintain more than 25 million square yards of grass at the sides of roads, equivalent to 3500 times the size of the pitch at the Maracana World Cup Final stadium in Brazil or 27,700 times the size of Centre Court at Wimbledon.

Workers at Scotland TransServ, which holds the contract to cut the grass, carry out the work with varying degrees of frequency, ranging from three times per year up to 14 times a year. Over the past year, they have cleaned more than 26,000 road gullies and 28 miles of channel drains, enough to stretch from Glasgow to Stirling.

They have also lifted 14,000 manholes to check what is inside, the equivalent of lifting more than 400 double decker buses.

Operations manager Malcolm Shanks said: "While the standard of groundsmanship required isn't quite up to that of the National Stadium or Centre Court, it's still a massive area of grass to be cut."