Bluetongue Has Cancelled Every Sheep and Cattle Class at Widecombe Fair and the Terrier Races Will Carry the Day
The Dartmoor fair of the Uncle Tom Cobley song runs on 8 September without livestock. Its sporting programme exists largely because of previous outbreaks.
Widecombe Fair takes place on Dartmoor on Tuesday 8 September, and none of the sheep or cattle classes will be judged. Bluetongue virus spreading through Devon has forced organisers to cancel every one of them, leaving the sporting card to hold the day together.
That card is not a thin one. Terrier racing runs twice, at a quarter to twelve and a quarter past three. The Uncle Tom Cobley downhill race is at a quarter to four. Egg tossing, new this year, is at four. Bale tossing is at five. Tug of war starts below the main ring at seven in the evening. The Devon Lumberjack Championships run in the forestry ring all day, and there is a family dog show at eleven, a town crier competition at eleven and two, and a shire horse display team at half past twelve and a quarter to three. Horse and pony classes are unaffected by bluetongue and all go ahead, heavy horses included.
The programme's dependence on games rather than animals is itself a product of disease. In 1989 an equine flu outbreak forced the cancellation of the pony classes, and the organisers filled the gap with terrier races, which have stayed on the timetable ever since. The fair was cancelled outright in 2001 for foot and mouth and in 2020 for covid, and suspended through both world wars, resuming in 1945 with gymkhanas and tug of war added to the bill. A children's sports day appeared in the 1920s and craft stalls in 1933.
Widecombe is the fair of the folk song, the one in which Tom Pearse lends his grey mare to Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney, Peter Davy, Dan'l Whiddon, Harry Hawke and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. A costumed villager still rides in as Cobley. The earliest documented reference to the fair is from 1850, when the Plymouth Gazette described it as a cattle fair, and it has been held on the second Tuesday of September ever since.
It is run entirely by volunteers for local causes, on a field south of the village that everyone calls the Fair Field. The souvenir programme costs £4 and carries the map and the full timetable. In 175 years the fair has been cancelled twice. Losing the livestock is what it does instead.