The unmanaged uplands are a breeding ground for lyme disease, and we are all paying for it

This week the Yorkshire Post carried a warning that ought to concern anyone who walks, works or lives in the uplands. Tick numbers are soaring, and with them the threat of Lyme disease. Moorland groups across the North have reported chicks carrying a heavy tick burden, dogs returning from unmanaged ground covered in them, and a disease season that no longer ends when the weather turns.

The UK Health Security Agency records around 1,500 laboratory-confirmed cases of Lyme disease in England and Wales each year, and estimates the true figure at three to four thousand. Lyme Disease Action, drawing on a 2019 study of GP records, puts the real number closer to 10,000. Twenty years ago the country saw roughly 250 reported cases a year. Whichever figure is used, the direction of travel is the same, and it is the wrong way.

What the coverage touched on, but did not fully draw out, is why the ticks are spreading and who has spent decades holding the line against them.

A tick needs three things to thrive: a host to feed on, vegetation to climb and wait in, and a climate that lets it stay active for longer. The uplands are now offering all three more generously than at any point in living memory.

Milder winters mean the old high-risk window of February to October has given way to near year-round activity. Long, rank, unmanaged vegetation gives questing ticks the cover and humidity they need. And the steady retreat of grazing livestock has removed one of the most effective natural controls there is. As farming leaders quoted in the Yorkshire Post put it, sheep act as a mop. They pick up ticks as they graze and keep the sward short enough to deny them shelter. Where the sheep have gone, the ticks have moved in.

This is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of the story. A great deal of current upland policy is actively making the problem worse. Destocking, rewilding by neglect, the steady squeeze on hill farming and the campaign against active moorland management have all reduced exactly the kind of intervention that keeps tick populations in check. The result is more bracken, more rank grass, more deer and other untracked hosts, and a landscape that suits the parasite rather than the people who use it.

Against this, gamekeepers and the wider moorland community do something the public rarely sees and almost never hears credited.

They control the vegetation that ticks depend on. Carefully managed burning and cutting break up the dense, humid mat of old growth where ticks shelter and breed. They manage host numbers, keeping deer and other tick carriers at sustainable levels rather than letting them multiply unchecked. They treat and dip livestock, turning sheep into a working part of the control system rather than a reservoir for disease. And on grouse moors in particular, they deploy tick mops, treated sheep walked across the ground specifically to draw ticks away from wildlife and reduce the burden on ground-nesting birds.

None of this is glamorous. All of it is relentless, year after year, and most of it is paid for privately by the very shooting estates that current policy so often seeks to constrain. It is, in the truest sense, a public health service delivered for free by people the public has been encouraged to view with suspicion.

The Lyme story has a close cousin that proves the point. Louping ill is a tick-borne virus that kills sheep and red grouse, and new analysis by the Moredun Research Institute shows how far it has travelled. In 2015 recorded cases sat in a tight cluster in the Scottish Borders. In the decade since, the virus has spread across most of upland Britain. West and South Yorkshire have seen incursion since 2019, in a region where North Yorkshire has lived with it for over a decade.

A spreading tick-borne disease in livestock and wildlife is the clearest possible early warning of a spreading tick-borne risk to people. The two travel together, carried by the same parasite, favoured by the same conditions, held back by the same management. We are watching louping ill march across the hills in real time. Lyme disease follows the same map.

David Whitby spent forty-five years as a gamekeeper and deer stalker, thirty-eight of them as head keeper on the Petworth Estate. He has lived with Lyme disease for fourteen years after being bitten at work. He describes waves of exhaustion so complete he would have to pull over and sleep, a tiredness that could not be fought. On one rare grouse shooting invitation he had to ask his loader to wake him when the birds were coming.

That is what this disease does to a fit man who spent his life outdoors. It is also a reminder that the people most exposed to ticks are the same people doing the most to control them. Gamekeepers, farmers and moorland workers stand on the front line of this twice over: most at risk of infection, and most active in suppression.

The lesson is not complicated. Where the uplands are actively managed, tick numbers are held down, vegetation is controlled, host populations are balanced and the risk to people, pets, livestock and wildlife is reduced. Where management is withdrawn, the ticks advance.

If the country is serious about confronting the rise of Lyme disease, the answer is not less moorland management but more, and a recognition that the gamekeepers and farmers who do this work are part of the public health solution, not an obstacle to it.

The alternative is already visible on the map Moredun has drawn: an unmanaged landscape, a spreading disease, and a bill that falls on rural communities first and the wider public soon after.

The ticks are not waiting for the policy to catch up. Neither should we.