The hours are hellish, the travel gruelling, the emotional toll immeasurable: is it any wonder nobody wants to be a traditional country vet any more... Nigel Farndale visits 'All Creatures Great and Small' country and finds James Herriot is long gone

Roll the words 'country vet' over your tongue. Only three syllables and three vowels, but all the resonance of a tuning fork. Twenty years ago, these words would have evoked James Herriot, the Dales vet turned best-selling author. All Creatures Great and Small, the long-running television series based on his semi-autobiographical novels, was as familiar and comforting as a log fire or a pot of tea.



Farmers wore flat caps and spoke in broad accents, they were amusingly contrary and dour, and they always seemed one step ahead of the earnest, gentlemanly vets.

But even when it first appeared in the late 1970s, All Creatures Great and Small was nostalgic; set in a folksy 1940s England that was rapidly disappearing. Intensive farming was on the way; thundering tractors had long since replaced draught horses and veterinary medicine was becoming more sophisticated. As Herriot himself put it: 'Years ago, farmers were uneducated and eccentric and said funny things, and we ourselves were comparatively uneducated. We had no antibiotics, few drugs. A lot of time was spent pouring things down cows' throats. The whole thing added up to a lot of laughs. There's more science now, but not so many laughs.'

Nowadays, the words 'country vet' evoke...... what... Images of mass culls, probably. The stench of pyres. All those diseases that chill at their mere mention: avian flu, BSE, bovine TB, bluetongue, and most notoriously, foot and mouth.

For a time, the vet seemed to be a harbinger of doom or, worse, an agent of an unfeeling government. Just as priests in the Middle Ages were blamed for the spread of the Black Death - superstitious villagers jeered at them - so vets found themselves held in suspicion by some farmers. It is no coincidence that the first vets were referred to as 'the priests of nature'.

advertisementDoes the real country vet lie somewhere between these two stereotypes... To find out, I spent a day with one in Wensleydale, North Yorkshire, in part because this was where much of All Creatures Great and Small was filmed, but also because this was where I grew up, on a farm.

A visit from the vet was always worth a stare. To a child, he seemed an exotic creature, always smelling of disinfectant, always using long Latin words when making a diagnosis. One of ours would manage to smoke a pipe as he felt around inside a cow, another always wore a bowtie and had mutton-chop whiskers. He would ask me to fetch him a bucket of hot water, a task that made me feel important. His name was Jack Watkinson and he has since retired. His son, John, aged 48, runs the practice, Hollin Rigg, on the outskirts of Leyburn.

The view from his surgery is one of the most captivating in England: hay meadows framed by dry-stone walls and thick hedgerows that lead the eye up the Ure valley towards the sleeping giant that is Penhill. It is the reason that the television series was filmed here rather than in the more prosaic landscape around Thirsk, which was where Alf ...Wight had his practice. That was Herriot's real name, by the way. He was obliged to take a pen name because British law forbade veterinary surgeons from advertising. The profession has always been blighted by red tape.

The foot and mouth epidemic of 2001 came to within a mile of this idyllic place. It was a stressful time to be a vet. The contiguous cull was a panic measure introduced when state vets realised that the disease was spreading out of control. Farmers who resisted were subjected to dawn raids by government officials accompanied by police in riot gear. Up to 10 million animals were slaughtered - a million of them unnecessarily as they were subsequently shown not to have the disease - and the countryside was turned into a horror show. Plumes of black smoke. The smell of death. An animal holocaust that left witnesses traumatised. Neighbour feared neighbour. Visitors were turned away. The general election was postponed for a month. Researchers at Lancaster University have shown that vets suffered almost as much as farmers, with reports of distress, flashbacks and nightmares - the suicide rate among them increased to four times the national average, and the method was always the same: the same lethal injection that they used to put animals down.

Watkinson is not the depressive type, but he did find the foot and mouth crisis frustrating. 'It was chaos,' he says. 'We felt we were banging our heads against a wall with Defra [the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs]. The licensing and the movement restrictions kept us busy, and I was constantly sending Defra letters on behalf of clients pleading to move their stock from fields with no grass.

The country vet: a dying breed - Telegraph

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