Memories of “dystopian” foot-and-mouth disease outbreak

Twenty-five years on, farmer William Lambert is still reluctant to revisit his memories of the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak and the devastation it brought to his Yorkshire Dales home.

On 6 March 2001, a date Lambert can still recall, a case of foot-and-mouth was confirmed at his farm near Hawes.

It was the first of 133 cases of the highly contagious virus in North Yorkshire, making the county one of the worst-affected areas nationwide.

That day, a crestfallen Lambert told BBC Look North the news was “devastating”, knowing full well the sheep and dairy cows he kept would have to be culled in line with government orders to control the spread of foot and mouth.

Nationally, millions of animals were killed, with the wider rural economy also dealt a devastating blow.

“We’ve done everything humanely possible to keep ourselves safe – we haven’t been anywhere for 10 days,” said Lambert, whose quiet corner of Wensleydale had become the centre of a national story, in the Look North interview at the time.

Lambert, whose family history is interwoven with farming “as far back as we can basically find”, wasn’t just thinking of his livelihood in trying to keep his livestock safe.

“When you are a stock farmer you do have an alignment with your stock, especially small Dales farms,” he explains from the same farm 25 years later.

“Every cow had a name and we were home breeders, so every animal would go back generations.

“That was just wiped out in one day completely.”

Lambert lost 117 cattle and 168 sheep.

The government had taken a ruthless approach to try and contain the disease, which was first discovered in February 2001.

Where it was found, animals on that farm and others within 3km (1.8 miles) had to be killed.

“From our point of view we need to get them dead as quickly as possible to close down what they represent, which is a virus factory,” a spokesperson for the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) said at the time.

In total, more than six million animals were slaughtered and burned, with the image of piled-up burning carcasses an enduring memory of the time for many.

Exclusion zones around farms where cases had been confirmed were also commonplace.

In the Vale of York, in an effort to stop the virus from travelling to an intensive pig farming area, a 900-sq mile no-go-area centered on Thirsk was established, with a further buffer zone in place around that.

It was the stuff of Chernobyl, not the picture-postcard North Yorkshire countryside.