Seven-year-old Joanna lifts her hands to her face and breathes deep and long. She rubs them into her nose and cheeks with a wide smile. “I love the smell of sheep,” she beams. “It feels like the world hasn’t ever had foot and mouth.”

Lambs are once more butting their mothers for milk around the old stone pens on Andrew Walton’s farm, a sight that delights his daughter. Last year, almost to the day, Joanna lost her own 10 sheep when her father’s stock - more than 1,200 Suffolk ewes and lambs and 48 cattle - was “taken out” because foot and mouth had struck a neighbouring farm.

This proud upland site, which looks across to the Northumberland coast and the castles of Bamburgh and Dunstanburgh, was last spring the scene of mass slaughter. The night before the slaughtermen came, Mr Walton was in the thick of lambing, knowing that all his animals would be dead within hours. “It was my worst year ever,” says Joanna, becoming suddenly grave. She still takes out photographs of the sheep she reared herself and talks about them, “as if they were still here”, according to her father.

Only now can Mr Walton open his diary and read what he wrote after receiving the call that meant his stock would have to go: “fear; loneliness; pride; resignation”. He hardly slept or left his farm for weeks during the crisis. “I remember going to get my hair cut (a week after the cull) and feeling like a leper, unclean.”

Mr Walton was not the only one to keep such a record. Caroline Dickinson, a farmer’s wife, is also headteacher of Joanna’s school, the 47-pupil Ellingham C of E first school, four miles to the east. She made brief but poignant entries from the moment foot and mouth was confirmed in the UK, at Heddon-on-the-Wall, in the south of the county, in February 2001. Since the outbreak, the school has assumed a new importance in the future of this devastated community, not least because of the key supporting role it played.

Foot and mouth hit this eastern part of Northumberland between Alnwick and Seahouses late last spring, just when the rest of the UK was starting to think it was all over. On May 10, 2001, Mrs Dickinson wrote in her diary:

“The children are having a variety of reactions including nightmares and unusually vivid dreams, lack of concentration, insecurity and anxiety.” As a postscript, she wrote: “The long-term implications are hard to determine but already families are facing redundancy, dramatic loss of income, debt, threats to their livelihood and pressure to find additional or alternative work. The consequences are feelings of stress, guilt, anger, frustration, misery and futility.”

Only since Christmas has Mrs Dickinson been able to read those entries, so painful are the memories. In January, she submitted the diary as evidence to the Northumberland foot and mouth inquiry.

Three out of four of the school’s pupils are from farming families or live on farms and so were directly affected. Up to 28,000 animals in the area were wiped out. Carcasses were piled up in the corners of fields on the roads to Chathill, the neighbouring village. The Rev Adrian Hughes, the local vicar and the school’s chair of governors, made it his business to establish contacts within the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food, “as County Hall had closed its helpline”, to keep parents informed.

He and Mrs Dickinson kept an open door at the school to cope with parental anxiety. He recalls one parent having to be hauled out of a hedge where he’d gone to put a gun to his head. “The kids were exposed to a huge emotional roller-coaster and needed extremely careful handling,” he says.

Mr Walton, a reserved, proud man, was prepared to nurse his grief alone, but the school stayed in contact. “Adrian came well to the fore,” he remembers. “He would phone people up whether they wanted it or not. You felt the staff understood, they catered for each child rather than dealing with them as a batch. The fact that Caroline is from farming stock is a bonus.”

Local residents and workers, consulted as part of reviews for redevelopment of the neighbouring land estates of Ellingham and Doxford, confirmed that the school is the cornerstone of the community’s viability. Without it, they said, attracting new blood into the area would be difficult. At the back of everyone’s mind is uncertainty over the review of education provision being conducted by an impoverished Northumberland County Council, which is trying to cut 7,000 surplus places. Locals fear small schools will be closed.

Since foot and mouth, Caroline Dickinson has worked hard to develop and improve Ellingham; last month it received a government School Achievement award. All pupils who entered key stage 1 national tests last year gained at least level 2 despite the traumas. A lively woman full of laughter and determination, she knows how tough farming can get. Ten years ago, she and her husband were farming in Kent with 900 head of sheep, but lost everything - stock, farm, home - when their business partner “saw the writing on the wall” for farming and pulled out. They moved north with five young children to look for a farming tenancy.

Mrs Dickinson went back to teaching to provide most of the family income. Although they have retained their stock this time round, they have been unable to move or sell their sheep. “My income is paying for sheep feed at the moment,” she says. “If we could sell the lot we probably would. It might have been better for us if they had been culled.”

Mrs Dickinson had been in post, her first headship, only a few months when foot and mouth hit Ellingham. She brought in extra help to man the telephone so that she and the staff were always on hand for parents. The Rev Mr Hughes stationed himself at the school for information and counselling at the start and end of every day, as he could not get to the farms. Mrs Dickinson also brought in an educational psychologist who specialises in bereavement counselling to support staff and children. “Not a day went by without somebody on the doorstep in tears,” she says.

Every day seemed to bring more horror. Up to 150 wild boar which had been raised on an Ellingham farm in fields “visible to many houses” had to be shot where they roamed, an event that “ignited much local anguish”.

Older brothers and sisters attending the middle school in Alnwick were witnesses to culling when their bus was stopped at a roadblock, as the driver had not been told to reroute their journey. All of these traumas became part of the school’s business as families had nowhere else to go. Sheila Stanton, Ellingham school’s caretaker for the past 25 years, says:

“Thank God the school was here, a place where we could all comfort each other, that brought us together.”

Now the community is determined that the school remain the focal point for the rebuilding of any future. Since foot and mouth, says Mrs Dickinson, locals have been “desperate” to get involved in school activities, which have included sports coaching and the setting up of a school ceilidh band.

The epidemic has hit hard. Farming in the area was in decline but people say foot and mouth has accelerated the process by 10 years. Andrew Walton must give up the fine 18th-century farmhouse that has been his home for the past 14 years, because the landlord intends to redevelop it, possibly for holiday homes. Although he will retain tenancy of the surrounding land and some outbuildings, he has to move to a smaller lowland farmhouse, relinquished by a farming couple who have lost heart and retired early.

Julie Baillie has two boys - Alistair, nine, and Andrew, seven - at Ellingham school, where she helps out with reading. Her sons were fearful of losing their pet lambs on their grandparents’ farm. Their father, Stuart, recently lost his job as a foreman on a farm that could no longer afford to keep him on. Mrs Baillie says: “People are going down, losing everything.”

John and Mairi Campbell, who have a son Edward, seven, at Ellingham and two daughters, Flora, 12, and Camilla, 10, at middle school in Alnwick, farm land adjoining Mr Walton’s. Remarkably, they were the only “Ellingham school” farmers to retain their stock - black-faced Suffolk sheep and milky-white Charolais cattle, some worth tens of thousands of pounds each - all pedigrees with “irreplaceable blood lines” established by Mr Campbell’s family for the past 28 years.

“This is a life’s work - if this lot had gone, we could never have built it up again,” says Mr Campbell. The children were kept at home for weeks in a bid to save the stock and were the only help their father had with the lambing of 700 ewes. Ellingham school sent Edward work and messages of support from his peers by email (his key stage 1 national tests were pending), and kept in touch by phone.

Mairi Campbell says Ellingham has taken on a new significance as the “only central point in the community. Several times I phoned in tears, just to talk. The school is a place where everybody knows each other and where the children are developed as individuals. Without it, this area would become a wilderness.”

In the entrance to Ellingham church, a magnificent cruciform building on a rise overlooking the surrounding area, there is a “prayer tree”, created by pupils during their last harvest festival. “I hope that everything is normal again”; “I hope that foot and mouth will go away for ever and ever”, the prayers read.

During the epidemic, the children kept a prayer board in school every day. To the community, those prayers mattered. Now foot and mouth is over, the school and the children in it matter. More than ever.