Black Hill, Bleak Summer

Twenty years after the UK's worst outbreak of the livestock disease foot-and-mouth, Dave Howard recalls how it affected the Herefordshire hill-farming community where he grew up. Images of burning piles of livestock carcasses became grimly familiar across the UK in 2001. More than six million sheep and cattle were killed in a bid to control foot-and-mouth disease. It was a national catastrophe that played out locally, out of sight to most of us, often in remote farming communities like Craswall in Herefordshire. The Craswall valley lies in the shadow of the Black Hill - made famous by the writer Bruce Chatwin - on the edge of the Black Mountains, near Hay on Wye. It was a hotspot of the 2001 outbreak. Several farms had their livestock shot and burned, in what they describe as a poorly handled 'invasion' of the Ministry of Agriculture officials, vets, and military. One local farmer took his life amid the outbreak. Others lost pedigree herds and flocks they had spent their entire working lives building up to pure bloodlines. In Black Hill, Bleak Summer, Dave Howard re-visits the upland sheep and cattle farmers who were his childhood friends and neighbours. He also speaks to vets and other officials in charge of responding to the crisis, about whether things would be handled differently in future. A Bespoken Media production for BBC Radio 4