[Closed] Fifteen Years!

I think that cyclist must have foot and mouth if he/she needs to push up that hill...

And later this year, boom

[img] http://www.trbimg.com/img-541131d7/turbine/la-na-wtc-9112001 [/img]

Time flies when you are having fun.

^ WAC

Was foot and mouth the point where the future of MTB in the countryside really became secured?

I'd been riding for a few years at that point - but in having pretty much everything taken away, it suddenly became clear how important tourism and recreation really was for the rural community.

the tolerance for MTB around places like the Dales national park certainly changed for the better after F&M

dragon - you've still got a few minutes to change your pathetic comment.

I'm young enough that foot and mouth wasn't something I was aware of/bothered about 15 years ago. Just how much did it scare people? How much did it effect access to the countryside while it was an issue?

I'm aware that a lot of cattle were culled and that my parent's didn't feed me beef as a kid, but that's about it.

Jakd95 - I couldn't ride. At all. I lived in Bristol; the woods were closed as they had deer in them. I used to go out for road rides but that was it. Bridleways were out of bounds; anything which went close to farmland was prohibited.

When they finally lifted the ban I remember going out for 3 hours after work to Aston Court and Leigh Woods on magically restored trails. It was completely amazing. It felt like some sort of catharsis.

From Bikebiz

http://www.bikebiz.com/news/read/when-you-can-t-see-the-wood-for-the-mtbers/04627

Foot & Mouth is what give impetus to Seven Stanes and other Forestry Commision MTB centres

In North Wales NWMBA ran a small but successful local XC race series. After the foot and mouth outbreak the series never recovered and has been consigned to history. Sad really.
Where we lived there was loads of common land used for sheep grazing, so the whole area was a no-no. I remember doing miles and miles along local lanes just to get out on the bike.

I was at uni and suddenly all my local trails were closed, first you thought nothing of it...then you saw the piles of dead sheep and cows...then the fires...and the smell. It was a pretty dark time.

If you get a chance to read A Shepard's Life by James Rebanks (and you really should, it's bloody brilliant), there's some very emotive words on it in there. It was devastating for a lot of rural communities.

I was during a long period when I wasn't riding so didn't affect me in that way, but I still remember it.

My memory is a bit fuzzy (my memory of the late 90s and early 2000s is hazy at best anyway).

I flew into Sydney in July 2000, months before it broke out - but there must have been something going on - they asked in the airport if we'd been on any farms recently - which we had, we'd got back from Glastonbury festival a few days previously - so they took our walking boots and cleaned them for us - no idea how they did it, but they came back like new and bone dry!

I returned to the UK in March 2001 and it had just become front page news, perhaps the Aussies were concerned about something else - BSE maybe?

As someone less than politely pointed out above, the WTC fell a few months later and marked a real change in attitudes - the early 90's were a bit rough - recessions, riots and in the UK a Government drowning in sleaze and circling the drain since Maggie stabbed in the back - but the mid 90's were a pretty good time to be a Brit, optimism abound, pre-Gulf War 2 Tony Blair was still sane (ish) Brit Pop and all that and always something exciting going on - the Cold War was over than despite some terrible acts in the dying months even 'The Troubles' seemed to be coming to an end that all ended with the WTC going down - 1999 and 2000 a glorious 2 year period - peace and prosperity - well, mostly anyway. It's never been the same since.

Jakd95.

Imagine being confined to tarmac only. It was awful. At the time my girlfriend and I were living on the edge of Baldock in Hertfordshire in a cluster home with no garden. Fields right in front of the house, Miles and miles of bridleways on my doorstep and not allowed on any of it.

I felt like a battery human.

what did F&M teach me? farmers are lying scum out to screw the system....

Bit of a generalisation granted, but plenty of animals were being moved despite the supposed restrictions. Then you have the explosion in bTB that followed because no testing and restocking.

Then the issue of tracks that disappeared, were blocked and never reinstated etc.

First pic - road out of Heptonstall?

I wasn't yet a teenager at the time and remember being aware of it, but don't remember it having a huge impact. I lived in rural North Lincolnshire so surrounded by farmland, but the vast majority arable.

Can't believe 9/11 was 15 years ago though. It was clear at the time that was turning point in history.

I'm young enough that foot and mouth wasn't something I was aware of/bothered about 15 years ago. Just how much did it scare people? How much did it effect access to the countryside while it was an issue?

I'm aware that a lot of cattle were culled and that my parent's didn't feed me beef as a kid, but that's about it.

I lived on a farm at the time, weirdly I did a lot more MTBing because to all intents and purposes I was banned from leaving, so just rode the same loops over and over again.

Not eating beef was to do with BSE and CJD, you can't catch foot and mouth through food so there was never a danger. It was horrible neurological disease that pretty much destroyed the British beef industry. We lived on/around farms and even we didn't eat it.

Id just bought a new mountain bike and my first GPS. It was a Whyte Preston and Garmin's etrek yellow thing. No maps on it, you just created a little bread crumb trail and tried to follow it back.

The only place I could ride it was down the tow path through the middle of Oxford.

I worked (as an environmental consultant) on the Tow Law disposal site in the NE (after they stopped using pyres to dispose of carcasses). A big pit of rotting cows and sheep was a bit grim. At first the biosecurity measures were pretty intense (big odour suppression units, lots of chemicals and pressure washing).

I vividly recall the sight and sound of sheep carcasses being run over by a waste compactor on a large concrete slab before being scooped up by a loading bucker and tipped into disposal pit. Cows were generally lifted in by a strap off one leg. They all had to be pierced to avoid gas build up and avoid the risk of bloated carcasses bursting.

Walking over the top of temporary capping in those pits was like crossing a trampoline or jelly. The water came out of the carcasses first (bodies being 75%-ish water) and it was akin to a swimming pool filled with a really nasty, runny jelly. A temporary earth cap flipping on this jelly layer on one site and a dozer getting pretty well immersed weren't much fun.

I remember colleagues working on another pit in north (?) Cumbria that the Royal Engineers had done the initial construction of. Unfortunately, whilst they are probably excellent in conflict the nuances of needing the pit to be in cohesive soil (clay) for containment purposes was missed. It endeded up intersecting a water-bearing gravel layer. Subsequent "leakage" from the pit turned local groundwater pink (not such a cute and fluffy colour in this instance). Eventually it was sorted out by installing a pretty big cut-off wall round the whole area.

They were "interesting" times. We had a suspected arson attack on the Dept of Environment site cabins. The resulting heat melted all our PCs and testing equipment in the neighbouring cabin. The locals also liked to hurl rocks at the haulage wagons bringing in the carcasses.

Despite all this I remember enjoying a few rides at Hamsterley on a demo-bike Orange Sub-5 from Leisure Lakes. I thought some of the Welsh centres were pre-F&M but the 7 Stanes were a direct response to the impact in the Scottish Borders.

I also remember Lincolnshire beaches being closed at first which all seemed a bit mad.

Took awhile before they shut the area around here but when they did Glentress opened up with areas to clean your bike before and after so just headed there.

During the bse crisis I ate loads of beef as it was so cheap and the risk was extremely low.

Yes there was a handful of farmers who moved cattle still but calling them all lying scum bags is over the top. Do you have evidence of ROW not reopening and why didn't you challenge it? Or are you just generalising again?

I did quite a bit of cheeky night riding (lights were rubbish then)and was threatened by the mad farmer at Ennerdale just after the ban was lifted.

Crikey, fifteen years ago!

I remember they installed alot of mats soaked in some sort of chemical on the roads near my childhood home area. Dunno if they did this nationally, but I lived in rural South Lakes which was badly affected

Can remember the carcasses getting loaded into wagons to be taken away. Truly grim, much like Cheeky Monkey's stories up there ^

We couldn't ride our dirt jumps and downhill track on Blawith Common 🙁 Or do much in the way of cycling at all.

We've got two farms just on the outskirts of Harrogate, we have Beef Cattle and Sheep. Yup, we got affected pretty bad. All the 54 herd and 210 (IIRC) Sheep had to go. It was as sad a situation as you could ever imagine.
Being a small holding (well kinda) the animals are treated like Pets, all have names, all have characters and we breed too. Which means lots of trace-ability and passports now a days, but then nothing really was in place. Farmers back then just did business between each other without the MinOfAgg getting involved.

We watched as artic's came up the lanes filled to the brim of cattle from local areas, heading towards Skipton where the nearest "pit" was. Generations of cattle, generations of business heading off to be burned. We know of two local farmers who took their lives because of the devastation this caused.

It's a very bad and odd statement to say all farmers as cheating scum, continuing to move cattle when the ban was on. It's simply not true. I'm not saying it didn't happen in the early days, it did take a while for the MinOfAgg to get the message out. We didn't hear until 2 weeks into the Ban on movements either but you have to think that most farmers in this country have an average of 60 cattle (thereabouts) and thats a small number of cattle yet a massive rural area.

I also remember the restrictions on the public going across farms, fields and certainly moorland. It's hard not to remember the times we saw folks walking over the moors whilst the ban was on, not caring nor GAS about the transfer of disease, but thinking more about their liberty and the fact that they thought they were above the law. We have 5 footpath running through the farm, back then it was hard to stop people using the footpaths because of the Ban, they couldn't have cared less about the situation.

Of course those days brought about substantial changes, quite right too. It's a robust system now, filled with red tape and control mechanisms. Some changes seem draconian, some hardly fit the bill. But they're in place.

😕

was living in Holland at the time, which also got FMD at the same time
only thing I noticed there was a total lack of milk in the super market one day, and still not restocked when I went in the next day, to which I thought "that's strange!".

they nipped it in the bud asafp, but Tony Bliar was always "I want to be in control". so that mixed with farmers moving animals despite the ban made it spread.

The Dutch (and maybe parts of Belgium and Germany?) had it pretty much sorted by the time Bliar admitted defeat, so the UK (mostly England and probably Wales) was a FMD 5h1tstorm that took months to sort.

There was also that 2nd FMD case when the FMD research place near Guildford accidently let some out. They did learn their lesson and get on the ball asafp that time, so only lasted a few weeks.

back home in Kent is mostly arable/orchards, but still had an exclusion zone due to 1 farm in Essex. none of the bridlepaths got permanently lost, and it probably only really affected a few fruit farms that kept a couple of horses as a side interest.

and 11/9 was the first week of working on my (then) new project.

flying back from Turin to Amsterdam on 12/9 was surreal. even more surreal was that Schiphol airport was using the approach over Leiden that day, so walking to the bar that night, those planes felt awfully low overhead. I'm sure it was no different to normal, but psychologically they seemed lower than usual.

and my colleague literally shat himself, since he'd got so cheesed off with the stockmarket that he'd sold his entire investments on 10/9, and thought he'd be an investigation suspect.

flew to French Guiana on the 1st anniversary. thanks for the reminders.

I lived in Dartmoor during foot and mouth. I was still at school. Remember it being a big deal. Had to step on sterilizing mats before going into the school grounds. No access off the roads in many places. The smell of the pyres when the wind was blowing. Lots of things like meat and milk not available in the shops.
Pretty crazy.

It wasn't a good time, however, it did allow the marketing machine to sell mountain biking-in-a-can to the masses after it.
Mountain biking has been around far longer than trail centres but on the back of the outbreak, a new form of mtbing came along and was bought into by the masses.
An observation rather than a grumble.

The draft of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act was published before F&M. It included restrictions on access after dark and through farmland
The behaviours of the general public throughout the epidemic convinced enough MSPs that responsible access was possible. Conversely, the strength of the land owners/managers lobby was reduced when it was shown they couldn't be trusted.

There were a number of "walk-in"s on land that should have been opened up to the public again but the owners/managers were illegally keeping it closed. I also got fired as a Volunteer Ranger in the local Regional Park for passing on to the BBC a letter we'd been given supporting illegal trail closure.

What a maverick, eh?

Oh,

Red sky at night,
the sheep are alight.

Red sky in the morning,
the sheep are still burning.

what did F&M teach me? farmers are lying scum out to screw the system....

@bikeboiy very intersesting. We must meet up sometime

It was quite bad round our way in Dumfries & Galloway and i know of some farmers (friends) who were utterly distraught at the needless destruction of their small herds of cattle as they had been raised from generations of stock on the farm - it was quite something to experience as you don't expect to see gruff hill farmers in floods of tears as they tried to cope with the loss of their cattle that they knew by name/personality. Many of them sold up to the larger ltd farming companies as they did not want anything more to do with an industry that treated them so inhumanly.

Then again i also know of other farmers in this area who thought nothing of moving around infected cattle for a price to infect other farms and there was wanton overstating & movement of existing feed stores (for which they were handsomely compensated) - the compensation that a few of the larger farms in the Kirkcudbright area received was truly astronomical.

The entire mess was handled very badly in my opinion - those that truly loved and cherished their animals (almost like pets) were driven out of the system to make way for the larger factory style farming model to move in.

We had moved back to Wales from Germany at the tail end of 2000 to gradually take over the family farm from my dad. We bought with us 2 cattle we had been given as a leaving present from a farm we had worked on over there. I remember the winter as being incredibly wet and the lambing was particularly tough. We had 12 lambs on the bottle that year and lots of new calves in the barn, including our cows we had bought over and there week old calves. Then, on Good Friday a vet appeared at the farm saying there was a possible outbreak next door and that they would be there on Easter Sunday to take all the stock. The cattle and calfes wer shot in the barn and loaded into a lorry by spiking them on a loader. All the sheep were shot in the corner of a field and the lambs put down with injection (till they ran out, then they shot them too). All the bottle lambs were carted off too. There then followed 6 months of gangs of strangers wandering round and deeply disinfecting everything, burying loads of stuff and generally trying to make as much money off the job as they possibly could. I remember a paint brush being delivered from 40 miles away in a 15 tonne lorry as it was the only thing the had available! A lot of people made a lot of money off the back of the F&M, and it wasn't the farmers. We had to wait a full 12 months before we could buy any new stock, and of course it was particularly expensive due to lack of supply.

And the best bit. The neighbour never even had the disease after all the tests had been done. What a waste. My partner has never really recovered from the whole damn episode.