Pyres piled high with sheep, cattle and pigs form beacons across the country. An ancient disease is carried on the wind, and farmers are prisoners on their land. Horse-racing has been suspended, the rugby has been called off and Tony Blair's preferred date in May for the general election is in doubt.
As more and more cases of foot-and-mouth disease are confirmed, the countryside groans under the weight of more hardship, and a sense of doom creeps into the nation's psyche.
Britain prides itself as a country with the means and the resources to cope with any crisis. An EU compensation package for cattle, sheep and dairy farmers of more than £100 million sterling drawn down by the Agriculture Minister, Nick Brown, on Tuesday gave some reassurance to the countryside that an urban-focused government was prepared to protect the rural economy.
As each new case was confirmed more strips of disinfectant-soaked straw and buckets of Jeyes fluid appeared on country roads. But as the feeling of isolation among farmers has increased, so has the feeling of helplessness in the rest of the country as people watch and wait for the crisis to end.
Britain's love affair with the countryside, the pursuit of country sports and even the simple pleasure that can be found in escaping the city and walking across the Pennines at the weekend have been threatened as foot-and-mouth exerts a fiendish hold on rural areas.
As government vets and the men from the Ministry of Agriculture criss-crossed the country last week confirming the spread of the disease, people have been left to stand back and watch unable to help their country brothers and sisters, such is the isolating nature of the disease.
In a mere two weeks, about 45,000 animals in Britain have been slaughtered in an effort to contain the disease. No one expected to find it in the country because it has been 20 years since the last outbreak and 1967 when the last large-scale emergency occurred.
Farmers thought it had disappeared from Britain. But now an industry just beginning to get back on its feet after the devastation of BSE has been hit again. Some farmers have suggested that animal rights extremists introduced the disease by infiltrating laboratories to obtain samples or added infected meat to farm animals' feed.
There have even been suggestions that asylum-seekers who have been in contact with unclean sheep herds in Kurdistan and have been dispersed around the country by government policy have infected farm animals.
Two weeks after a government vet spotted the first signs in an infected sow at Cheale Meats, an abattoir in Essex, large parts of the countryside are at a standstill. This national crisis began on February 19th when a government vet, Craig Kirby, carried out a routine examination of a group of 27 sows at the abattoir. Kirby noticed something unusual: some of the sows had blisters around their mouths.
A telephone call to senior officials at the Ministry of Agriculture set the alarm bells ringing, and after an anxious 24 hours the tests came back positive for foot-and-mouth.
The Ministry made the official announcement the next day, and immediately a 10-mile quarantine zone was placed around the abattoir and two farms in Buckinghamshire and the Isle of Wight, which supplied pigs to the holding. On the same day, foot-and-mouth was confirmed among animals at a farm next to the abattoir that was owned by the same family.
But even the measures introduced to contain the outbreak could not prevent the spread of a disease carried by the wind and even on the mud on boots.
Soon the number of outbreaks had crept up to seven. It had now spread to sheep and cattle, and cases were suspected at an abattoir in Gaerwen, in Anglesey, and in Scotland. The mass slaughter of thousands of pigs and cattle had begun on eight farms across England, and government vets said they believed they had sourced the outbreak to a farm at Heddon-on-the-Wall, Northumberland.
In Devon, as farmers checked their animals for signs of the disease, the local National Farmers' Union group secretary, Simon Whattler, said a "thinly suppressed panic" was moving across the region.
"We have to be very concerned about people's state of mind," he said, as the Samaritans were briefed to expect calls from desperate farmers.
The Countryside Alliance, mindful of the potential of its members to spread the disease through close contact, called off its London protest march against the proposed ban on hunting with hounds, the collapse of the rural economy and other rural issues.
And Tony Blair, who described the disease as "a bitter and unfair blow" to farmers, led the cabinet and government agencies in an emergency meeting to co-ordinate the effort to eradicate foot-and-mouth.
By yesterday the 60-case barrier was broken as outbreaks of the disease were confirmed in all regions of the UK. The government is planning to ease restrictions on the movement of livestock, allowing some animals not infected by the disease to be sent for slaughter.
But the flicker of optimism expressed by Nick Brown, who said that if the disease could be contained within a small region of England the problem could be dealt with swiftly, has been extinguished.
Britain is living with foot-and-mouth disease again and rural dwellers are living under a prohibition that threatens to undermine national confidence in the countryside.
The economic viability of the farm is being questioned. The rural economy represents about 1.3 per cent of GDP, and economists argue that even a relatively long-term crisis will not damage a buoyant economy. But within the rural economy itself the effect of foot-and-mouth disease on farmers' incomes could be devastating.