Fellow farmers step in to save family home during field fire

Phil Monkman has lived on his North Yorkshire farm with wife Abi and their two daughters for six years.

He has been farming for “forever and a day” – but had never seen a fire like the one that ripped through their land earlier this month.

It started a few fields away from their family home near Malton while Phil’s father and a contractor were operating the combine harvester.

It did not seem very big at first, but they created a firebreak – a gap in vegetation acting as a barrier to slow or stop a fire’s progress – and called the fire service.

Within a matter of minutes, smoke was billowing over the house and farm buildings.

“We came back and [the fire] was two fields further over than where I last left it,” says Phil, 36.

“I think the speed that it went shocked everyone. I would say running pace at least.”

The fire on 9 July marked the peak of the UK’s third official heatwave of the summer, with temperatures in Malton hitting about 32C at the time.

Another fire engulfed a tractor and a field in Hovingham nine miles away on the same day, with a fire destroying an entire unit at the nearby Malton and Norton District Hospital the previous day.

When Abi, 38, got home from work, the fire had almost reached the garden fence.

“I just rang Phil in a panic, saying ‘the fire is at the house’,” she says.

Friends and neighbours helped Abi to remove their horses and dogs from the farm, but she felt “helpless”.

“You see fires on telly – you don’t actually expect that it’s going to happen to you,” she adds.

“The reality that it’s so close to the house, that you could lose your house and not get your valuables out, it was pretty terrifying.”