It feels strange to be writing this in the time of a global pandemic – when communities are locked down, families isolated, and hygiene and handwashing at the forefront of everyone’s minds. For seven months in 2001, that’s what happened in Cumbria – albeit on a different scale and in different circumstances. At Watchtree Nature Reserve near Great Orton, a former airbase near Carlisle, there is a special stone. It’s inscribed as a memorial to the 448,508 sheep, 12,085 cattle and 5,719 which were taken there in the biggest mass burial of the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001. Twenty years ago, Cumbria found itself at the epicentre of this horrific epidemic which, official reports said afterwards, ‘was unique in the scale and duration’. That same report spells out the unimaginable scale of the death toll – more than a million sheep, over 200,000 cattle, nearly 40,000 pigs and in excess of a thousand goats and deer.
Reflecting on Foot and Mouth in Cumbria 20 years on | The Westmorland Gazette
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Reflecting on Foot and Mouth in Cumbria 20 years on
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Foot-and-mouth is still casting its shadow two decades later
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