Foot and mouth: the rural tragedy that even wiped out the Cheltenham Festival

Where the coronavirus failed, foot and mouth triumphed.

The 2020 Cheltenham Festival managed to squeeze into the history books. Nineteen years earlier, the most cherished of all jump meetings was lost, cancelled not once but twice at the hands of a disease that devastated British agriculture. British racing was also impacted and the final burden was not insignificant, but it was a crisis from which valuable lessons were learned.

Here was an appalling outbreak that produced horrendous images. More than six million sheep, cattle and pigs were slaughtered, many of their bodies burned in huge pyres that turned the countryside into a series of killing fields.