A FAMILY farm near Appleby will be forever remembered as dealing with the last case of foot and mouth which struck the county this week 20 years ago.

By the time this was confirmed at Whygill Head Farm millions of animals in the UK had been slaughtered before the epidemic could be brought under control, with pyres of burning carcasses dominating the news coverage.

It caused a major crisis in British agriculture and had a lasting effect on rural communities.

Cumbria was the worst affected area of the UK with 893 separate outbreaks.

It has now been estimated by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs that before the first Cumbrian case - at Longtown - was confirmed, there were at least 38 farms in the county that had been seeded with the infection.

In the Lake District, foot and mouth threatened the iconic Herdwick sheep as the disease swept across its homeland, resulting in a loss of about a third of the population of the breed.

Earlier this week, Westmorland and Lonsdale MP Tim Farron tabled an early day motion in Parliament to mark two decades since the end of foot and mouth.

He said: “We should never forget the sheer devastation that foot and mouth brought to Cumbria.

“I saw the heartbreak at close quarters; seeing farmers who had worked all their lives having to give up their prized livestock is something that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

“However, in those dark times, you got to see Cumbria at its best, communities supporting one another.

“It’s that experience of pulling together in hard times that I believe gives us the hope to emerge stronger from the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

The foot and mouth crisis has many physical parallels with the impact of Covid-19.

Chairman of Cumbria Tourism Jim Walker said: “Foot and mouth hit the Cumbrian tourism industry - when all footpaths were closed in a bid to halt the scale. Nationally FMD cost the UK £8bn; Cumbria alone has lost £2bn from its economy already due to Covid.”

He added: “FMD was a major event, the scale of which was a huge shock to all of us. The same must be said about Covid. The mental health challenges - farmers before and now NHS and, indeed, the whole population including tourism workers.”

Eden Valley farmer and former leader of Eden District Council, Kevin Beaty, said: “Lessons that should be learned are to crack down early, which is what they have done with Covid but they didn’t do with FMD. What happened in Appleby was, by the time it reached that area, people had become complacent, and were moving around, and that probably added to the spread of the disease.”

Neil Hudson, MP for Penrith and The Border, said: “There are parallels to be drawn between the FMD and coronavirus crises – both are epidemics that shut down sectors of society and the economy, and both have/had the same result of putting the country on a ‘war footing’.”

FMD affected the whole country, but Cumbria was at the epicentre.

It affected the farming and tourism industries and also other sectors like horseracing. Livestock could not be moved around the country.

In Cumbria 45 per cent of farms were subject to culls, and this rose to about 70 per cent of farms in the north of the county.