In the Crown Hotel in Lynton, they tell a gruesome tale about the Valley of Rocks. One June night in 1995, a chef, raging drunk, snatched up a meat cleaver and, announcing he was going to kill someone, vanished into the night. Early next morning, on the clifftop path that leads from the north Devon village to the valley, a dog-walker came upon a 300-yard trail of blood. A murder inquiry was launched, the scene was taped off, forensics tents erected and samples sent away for analysis.

The Valley of Rocks is one of those incongruous corners of rural England that seem immune to time’s passage. This is partly down to its sheer seclusion, pressed between the expanse of Exmoor to the south and the Bristol Channel to the north. Half a mile east is Lynton and, on the coast 500ft below, the village of Lynmouth, with its memorial museum to the devastating flood of 1952.

It is summer, but the drizzle is implacable and the ridges on either side are cloaked in fog. 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). He stops and raises his camera: 20ft ahead, a small horned form hobbles out of the mist and on to a boulder. It emits a little bleat.

When he isn’t driving lorries for Jewson, Kirby runs the Lynton Goats Facebook group. This morning, we’re looking for billies, though there are few if any left in the valley.

For a village whose economy relies on tourism, soiled pavements and the reek of billies in rut aren’t trivial concerns

“One was always aware that there were tensions,” Kirby says (he’s well-spoken, and trained as a viola player). “The Facebook group was intended as a forum where the different factions could meet on middle ground.”

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. With another bleat, she’s gone into the mist.

“The situation certainly isn’t as extreme as it was,” Kirby adds as we edge down a scree slope to the car park. “People getting death threats, and so on.”

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. 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. 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. Three times someone bellows, “Shoot the lot!”

To understand the vitriol, a good place to start is Lynton’s cemetery, situated between the valley and the village. Of the 34 victims of the 1952 Lynmouth flood, 13 are buried here. What stands out are the steel cages surrounding each floral tribute. 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.

Rupert Kirby set up the Lynton Goats Facebook group as a middle ground where different factions could meet. Photograph: Jon Tonks/The Guardian

“You can leave daffodils, but that’s about it,” the mayor of Lynton and Lynmouth, Suzette Hibbert, tells me (daffodils being poisonous). Even plastic flowers get eaten down to the stalks. Quite apart from the cemetery, she adds, for a village whose economy relies almost entirely on tourism, the soiled pavements, the guesthouse gardens lain waste and the reek of billies in rut are not trivial concerns. “We’ve only got tourism,” Hibbert says. “We haven’t got anything else.” When I ask the woman running the Lyn Valley Art and Crafts Centre about the discord surrounding the goats’ management, she says, “Don’t talk to me about the goat wars.”

In 2005, the council erected a 6ft stock fence across the end of the valley closest to the village. It extends right to the sea down a near-vertical slope, but at low tide, the goats – being goats – can simply clamber down to the exposed foreshore and file into Lynmouth. When £40,000 was spent installing cattle grids on the lane through the valley, it was only a matter of days before the goats were tiptoeing across the bars.

Back in 1995, before the blood could be analysed or the chef apprehended, the then mayor came forward with some information. “The police are aware, or should be aware, that goat culling goes on,” he told the North Devon Journal’s Cathy Newman (later of Channel 4 News, but at this time on work experience). It was the first clue to the real source of the blood: the shooting of a goat by a council marksman. The chef, it turned out, had simply gone home to bed after his tirade.

Various factions have tended to agree that the goats must be managed, but how – whether by rehoming, or killing, or contraception – has been a point of rancour for years, to the extent that, at one point, a photo of Mayor Hibbert was displayed in a shop window daubed in red paint, and one of her council colleagues received anonymous threats directed at his grandchildren. The invective hasn’t been one-sided, either: one pro-goat campaigner I spoke to recently received a phone call so threatening, she reported it to the police.

In 1997, two years after the aborted murder enquiry, half of the 100 or so goats then living in the valley vanished almost overnight. An invoice came to light showing that the council had arranged for 40 of the animals to be killed. It was this incident that prompted Ray Werner and others to set up the Lynton Feral Goat Preservation Society.

The acrimony was at its worst during the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis, as Lynton relies on tourism and the area’s footpaths had to be closed because of the goats. Photograph: Jon Tonks/The Guardian

The day before going to Devon, I meet Werner at a city farm in Wimbledon, south London, where we speak over the horns of a golden Guernsey goat named Basil. An authority on British native goats, Werner has spent more than 40 years observing the Lynton herd. His interest in goats goes back to a period of sickness as a child in Germany, when, bedridden and delirious, he became obsessed with the pictures of goats in Johanna Spyri’s Heidi books. “I was off up the mountain with Heidi and the herd,” he remembers.

Goats are recorded in the manor of “Lyntonia” as far back as the Domesday book, but their presence in the Valley of Rocks has been intermittent since the mid-19th century. “There’s a story that if the goats ever leave the Valley of Rocks, bad luck will befall the village,” Werner says. “Every time the council wanted to get rid of them, they were scared to do it, because they didn’t want to be blamed for an avalanche, or Russia invading north Devon.”

The current herd can be traced to 1976, when three goats were transferred to the valley from a feral herd in the Cheviot hills of Northumberland. (“Feral” refers simply to a domesticated animal that has become self-sufficient in the wild.) Werner recently proved that the Cheviot goat is genetically identical to the rare old English goat, whose ancestors were introduced some 5,000 years ago. In appearance, the Cheviot shares characteristics with the semi-feral Exmoor pony: bulky, short-legged, with small ears and a thick, shabby coat.

Over time, the presence of dairy goats already in the Valley of Rocks, along with unwanted animals dumped there subsequently, led to a crossbreed herd. It’s partly this genetic dilution, Werner believes, that has caused the conflict with the human population. The original Cheviot goats, being hardier and having had little communication with people, were less likely to enter the village or bully picnickers.

The billies are pretty good at trashing the village. But it’s not their fault they’ve got a larder on the doorstep

In 1983, Lynton and Lynmouth town council appointed Werner keeper of the goats, an unofficial role that entailed his visiting the valley six times a year from his home in London, studying the herd and advising the council on management. His ambition was to restore the herd to its 1976 genetic purity by selective breeding and the removal of crossbreeds, but in the end his efforts were for nothing. “The council would panic while I was away, and do something silly that would disrupt the work: arrange for the goats to be shot or carted off. It was as if they were wearing blinkers.”

Today, the herd is more mixed than ever.

A few years ago, Werner had a call from the police in Barnstaple: one of his goats was trotting around the square, evading capture. Barnstaple is 18 miles across the moor. “It turned out the council had rounded up some of the goats behind our backs and taken them on a lorry to the abattoir, and one of them had escaped,” he says. “Joyce got him back. Good old Joyce. If the SAS had turned up, she would have faced them down.”

***

“The sad fact is,” Joyce Salter says, “the billies are pretty good at trashing the village. But it’s not their fault they’ve got a larder on the doorstep.” Joyce and her husband Eric moved to the area in 1993, and cofounded the Lynton Feral Goat Preservation Society with Ray Werner in 1997. Both worked in the public sector before retiring; Joyce in the library service and Eric as a bus driver.

Their priority, Joyce says, has always been the animals’ welfare. “The problem is, there’s been a long period of appalling management, and some kind of…” She pauses and glances at Eric. In 2002, they left the area for Cornwall, partly because of all the acrimony. The worst of it was during the foot-and-mouth crisis the previous year, when the area’s footpaths were closed to prevent walkers from spreading the disease to livestock. Lynton and Lynmouth’s struggling tourism providers campaigned for the goats to be removed, alive or dead, so the paths through the valley could be reopened. When Joyce presented a paper at a council meeting opposing the measure, she began receiving what she calls “hate mail”. In the end, the valley stayed open, the goats survived and the immediate area was spared infection (even if tourism all but dried up); but the resentments lingered.

Eric and Joyce Salter cofounded the Lynton Feral Goat Preservation Society, but moved to Cornwall for a decade to escape the hostilities. Photograph: Jon Tonks/The Guardian

Feral goats will keep to a discrete home range, provided they feel safe and have dry bedding, fresh water and a range of nutrients (in the Valley of Rocks, these are gorse, heather, bark, grass and flowering plants). They’ll stray only if deprived of those things due to environmental or population pressures. In Lynton, as well as eating flowers and bark on trees on the edge of the village, the goats have often been found sheltering under porches (they hate rain) and drinking from the public toilets.

“We even took a water trough to the valley for them,” Joyce says.

“Someone contaminated it,” Eric adds. “With a dead owl.”

Having returned only three years ago, partly for the goats, and partly to be close to their burial plot in the cemetery, Joyce is wary of reviving dormant enmities. “We always called it the secret agenda. There was something going on, which nobody ever got to the bottom of: whether it was trophy-hunting; whether it was supplying meat for the hunt dogs.”

The incident with the dead owl is not the last suspected attempt to harm the goats. A few years ago, a walker found a heap of sweet peppers left under a shelter in the valley. Noticing a quantity of blue grains packed into each one, she reported the discovery. Analysis by Defra identified the substance as a mixture of caustic soda and rat poison.

After that, the goats kept out of the local press, until March this year, when Hibbert’s deputy, Tony Meakin, received a visit from the police.

Lynton’s ‘goat budget’ is about £2,000 a year, or roughly £1.50 per resident. Photograph: Jon Tonks/The Guardian

Since his appointment last year, Meakin has assumed responsibility for managing the goats on the council’s behalf. (He has also done a stint as mayor.) He and his wife, Linda, retired to the village eight years ago, having lived in South Africa for 39 years. “I had hunting rifles in South Africa,” he says, “so I’m used to using weapons. And I’m handy.”

The grounds of Meakin’s house afford views over both the village to the north and the Valley of Rocks to the west, a good surveillance point for monitoring the goats’ movements. We are sitting in his conservatory drinking coffee as the rain patters on the roof.

One of the duties Meakin has taken on personally is to euthanise sick or injured animals. “Last year, eight kids were killed by dogs,” he says. “One got its back broken. The lady came to our gate in tears. She had this tiny little dog, and she said the dog was always so well behaved. The only thing I could do was bring the kid back here and put it down.”

The incident with the police still rankles. He’d had reports of a lame goat on the football pitch. “My gun was in the back of the Freelander. I got out of the vehicle, locked it, and went up towards the football pitch, and I saw some youths coming up the street. I thought, from a safety point of view, I’m not leaving my firearm in the car.”

Once he’d collected his rifle and the teenagers had gone on their way, he was confronted by an irate villager, who, having yelled at him to “leave the goats alone”, promptly called the police to report an armed male prowling the village. (Meakin’s gun licence entitles him to carry a firearm on council property, and no charges were brought.)

We need to maintain a reasonable balance. But who has the most rights, the goats or the residents? Goats don’t pay rates

Although they are feral, and therefore owned by nobody, the goats are ear-tagged and registered to the council, meaning that Meakin and his colleagues are obliged to look after their welfare and sign off the vets’ bills. (This year’s “goat budget” is about £2,000, or roughly £1.50 per resident.) “Some people believe that if you leave nature to itself, it will reach a natural balance,” he says. “Leaving nature to itself is why they ended up with 240 sick goats when we arrived. Every goat was riddled with worms, so it didn’t matter how much they ate, the food would go straight through them. The mess they were making was dreadful, and they were always hungry.” He attributes the overpopulation at the time to the council’s reluctance to intervene for fear of further abuse (Joyce Salter blames the threats received by council members on animal rights activists from outside the area).

It’s at this point that we’re joined by the current keeper of the goats, Jim Mackenzie (not his real name), Ray Werner having given up the role in 2009. He’s just strained his back hefting bales, and he sits with his forearms on the table, suppressing his discomfort. Having received threats himself in the past, he insists I don’t use his real name, but he’s not unforthcoming. As well as his council duties, he’s a gun dealer, and it’s from him that Meakin bought his rifle. As we talk, it becomes clear that Mackenzie is in fact the marksman who carried out the 1997 cull, as well as most of the subsequent culling. “I got rid of them,” he says matter-of-factly. “Four o’clock in the morning, 10 o’clock at night, in people’s gardens, right down in the village.” He favours a .243 Winchester with a silencer.

“We’ve got written approval from virtually every hotel and B&B in Lynton that we can go on to their property to shoot the goats,” Meakin adds.

A few years ago, a walker found sweet peppers packed with caustic soda and rat poison in the valley. Photograph: Jon Tonks/The Guardian

Mackenzie admits that animals killed in the past were sent to the hunt kennels, but only to be burned; they are also sold for meat. “It’s a way to get some money back into the village,” he says. “People have got the notion I’m making money out of it. I charge £5 to dispose of a goat: shoot it, load it up, take it away, put it in Tony’s garden, cover it up, contact Pierce’s [the local “collector of fallen stock”]. Oh, I’m making a fortune.”

“The fact is, human beings have affected the planet,” Meakin says, “and we need to try and make sure we maintain a reasonable balance. But who has the most rights, the goats or the residents? The goats don’t pay rates.”

Even those who object to the goats’ incursions into the village accept that they contribute to the valley’s tourist appeal; and there are few other animals that can keep the bracken and scrub under control (cattle and sheep tend to fall off the cliffs). As a site of special scientific interest, the Valley of Rocks is managed by Natural England under a Higher Level Stewardship scheme, and the council receives an annual grant of just over £10,000 towards its upkeep. Natural England’s recommendation is that the herd be reduced to no more than 50 nannies, plus unweaned kids. Twice a year, a roundup is organised by Mackenzie, with the help of volunteers from the village and the local agricultural college, during which the goats are driven into a temporary enclosure, examined and treated by vets, and sick or injured animals put down. At the last roundup in April, all but 11 of the 64 goats removed were rehomed, the remainder being sent for slaughter, leaving about 70 in the valley, virtually all of them female.

A couple of years ago, a programme was launched to give the nannies contraceptive jabs. But it’s impossible to round up all the goats in such steep and perilous terrain, Mackenzie explains, and since then, no fewer than 80 kids have been born, an increase on previous years.

Goats are recorded in the manor of ‘Lyntonia’ as far back as the Domesday book. Photograph: Jon Tonks/The Guardian

I walk back to the Valley of Rocks along the coastal path. Joyce and Eric Salter still keep an eye on the goats, and their names are often among the commenters on Kirby’s Facebook page, but the society is effectively defunct, and Joyce feels their efforts with Werner to preserve the old English goat were largely wasted. “When we lived here before, I could go to the valley and sit there with the goats, and think: ‘I never want to move from here for the rest of my life.’” But she’s no longer sure she and Eric will take up their plot in the cemetery.

They drove through the valley yesterday to recce the goats’ location, worried I’d struggle to find them. “There was a big herd under Castle Rock,” she says, “but there wasn’t a single billy.” I remember what Werner said about bad luck befalling the village if the herd were ever to go. South of Castle Rock, just as Joyce said, are eight nannies, bleating quietly to one another. Goats might be emblems of anarchy, but most of their lives are spent browsing and chewing the cud.

Among the adults, partly hidden in the bracken, is a kid without an ear-tag. There are ways to recognise a billy, even in the absence of horns, and his existence is a reminder that, for all the efforts to control them, the goats of the Valley of Rocks remain essentially wild. I take a step closer and he vanishes into the bracken.

• William Atkins is the author of The Moor (£9.99, Faber & Faber). His book about deserts, The Immeasurable World, is out next year.

• Commenting on this piece? If you would like your comment to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazine’s letters page in print, please email weekend@theguardian.com, including your name and address (not for publication).