Cornish trigging: the Easter tradition where families rake the banks of Helford River

• Watch Charlotte Gay's report

Armed with buckets, rakes and wellies - families of all generations took to the banks of the Helford River in Cornwall for the ancient tradition of trigging.

Trigging is an old Cornish term for cockle picking - dating back hundreds of years - but refers to any kind of handpicking of shellfish.

The practice is only permitted for one day of the year - on Good Friday - when families set out along creekside cockle beds at Bar Beach, Treath, and Gillan.

Ron Williams, 77, from Helston says he's been trigging on the Helford since he was a little boy. He says traditionally after children found their cockles they were given their Easter Eggs which "you'd eat before you got back to the car."

Chris Hosken, Commodore for Helford Sailing Club remembers picking cockles when he was just four or five years old.

Chris says within the old buildings you can see signs of people fishing for these shellfish thousands of years ago.

"I'm interested in archeology and in our place we found limpet and cockle shells within those spaces, so 2,000 years ago they were getting cockles and limpets and using the river as a food source."

The exact start of the tradition is unknown but bylaws were set out in 2003 to protect the numbers of common cockle from overexploitation in Cornish estuaries.

According to the Helford Marine Conservation group, it is estimated that an average of 17 gallons of cockles has been removed from Bar Beach each Good Friday. 

So to keep a healthy breeding population and it was decided that pickers should not take home cockles which are smaller than 20mm - "about the size of a 20p piece".

People may also only pick the shellfish by hand and any kind of harvesting by mechanical means such as "suction dredgers" is banned.

After picking the shellfish, most families take their collection home, clean the shells and prepare them for their dinner.