![]() When the popular matriarch of a local farming family was buried a few years ago, the bier’s wheels became clogged with dung and the wreaths left on her grave vanished no sooner than the funeral party had gone. What stands out are the steel cages surrounding each floral tribute. Of the 34 victims of the 1952 Lynmouth flood, 13 are buried here. To understand the vitriol, a good place to start is Lynton’s cemetery, situated between the valley and the village. Three times someone bellows, “Shoot the lot!” The fors are vocal enough, but when it comes to the opposing camp, the roar of loathing sits uneasily with the light-hearted tone of the show. In March, Steel visited Lynton and asked the crowd about the feral goats that inhabit the Valley of Rocks – who was for them and who against, he wanted to know. He suggests I listen to a recording of Mark Steel’s In Town, a Radio 4 show in which, each week, the comedian visits a different British community and encourages his audience to laugh at its own parochialisms. “People getting death threats, and so on.” “The situation certainly isn’t as extreme as it was,” Kirby adds as we edge down a scree slope to the car park. With another bleat, she’s gone into the mist. He’s wondering if the animal up ahead is a young billy, but when we get closer, the shape of its horns indicates it’s a female. “The Facebook group was intended as a forum where the different factions could meet on middle ground.” ![]() ![]() “One was always aware that there were tensions,” Kirby says (he’s well-spoken, and trained as a viola player). For a village whose economy relies on tourism, soiled pavements and the reek of billies in rut aren’t trivial concerns This morning, we’re looking for billies, though there are few if any left in the valley. When he isn’t driving lorries for Jewson, Kirby runs the Lynton Goats Facebook group. He stops and raises his camera: 20ft ahead, a small horned form hobbles out of the mist and on to a boulder. Yet my guide, Rupert Kirby, barely slows down even when negotiating the sandstone spine of Castle Rock, with the waves crashing 450ft below (he’s a young 54). It is summer, but the drizzle is implacable and the ridges on either side are cloaked in fog. ![]()
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