Beth Donovan

Keith met Hector and Nelson for the first time at eleven this morning, in a field in Denbighshire, and the three animals who have carried this account for a year stood in the same grass and did not know they had done anything. It happened because the parish council in Devon asked Dave to have Keith somewhere else for Bonfire Night, having found him on top of the bonfire a fortnight ago, and a farmer in Denbighshire who reads the account rang Dave and offered a spare paddock. The two men had never spoken. The biggest crossover in the history of this account was arranged in one phone call, by a man who wanted his village to light a fire in peace and a man who was curious. I drove over with a question. The account passed 200,000 followers this week, and the allegation is that these three are the reason. I left the notebook in the car. Dave backed the trailer up to the gate. Inside the field, a seventeen-hand Cavalry Black and a small grey donkey stood side by side at the far hedge and watched the ramp come down with the expression of two animals who have seen a trailer before and have not yet been impressed by one. Keith came down it without being asked and stopped at the bottom. For the first time in his life there was a horse the size of a shed in front of him and a donkey a third his own size beside it, and he looked at both for about four seconds, with those rectangular eyes, the way he looks at a latch he has not solved yet. Then he walked straight past them, and past the farmers, and past me, and put his nose on the field gate. Me: Keith. The allegation is that you built this. Your tracker. Your neighbour's file. Your Reverend. The goat from two fields over you open gates for. Keith: [lifted the latch] The gate swung in, and Nelson was standing in it. He had crossed the whole field to get there, and nobody saw him do it, which is how Nelson crosses fields. He put himself in the gateway with his chest across the gap, because in four years nothing has passed that gate without a donkey's say-so, and a goat from Devon was not going to be the first. Me: Nelson. There is a woman in Harrogate whose husband says your name at parking tickets. A man who gets to his gate at seven for the first time since his operation. People write to tell me you taught them to stand still. Nelson: [stood still] Keith put his head down and pushed, gently, the way he tests a post, and the donkey set his feet and leaned into it and gave nothing. A goat who has opened every gate in Devon, nose to nose in a three-foot gap with a donkey who has held every gateway in Wales. Neither raised his voice, because neither has one to raise. They stood there and were what they are, and waited to find out which of the two the world would turn out to be. Hector arrived above the pair of them, at the pace of a very large animal pretending it had meant to come anyway, and put his head down between them to see what the fuss was. Me: Hector. You stood for a nation while it wept. People tell me they watch you lie down in the sun and something in their own shoulders comes down with you. Do you accept responsibility? Hector: [breathed on the goat] The gate moved an inch in the wind. Hector went four feet sideways with his tail over his back, came back, and put his head over the donkey's spine to look at the goat from there, which is where he has looked at everything since the day a stranger produced a donkey from behind a trailer and the war horse found the one thing in Wales he would follow. Me: Any of you. Does it reach you at all, what you have done for people? Keith stepped back from the donkey, looked at the open gate and the lane beyond it, which he could have been through in two seconds, and then turned round, walked to the field shelter, went up the wall and onto the roof, and stood on the ridge looking at Wales. Nelson walked out of the gateway and back to the hay. Hector looked at the open gate, then at the donkey eating, and put his head down and grazed. The Denbighshire farmer, who had said nothing for ten minutes, went and shut it. Me, to the farmer: "I built a whole universe on these three." Farmer: "Aye. They've not read it. That's why it works." That was the only answer I got all day, and it is the right one. For a year the country has been told it is finished and its countryside is a crime, and 200,000 people have answered by leaning on a gate in Wales to watch a goat who cannot be governed, a donkey who cannot be hurried, and a horse who gave everything to strangers and is finally allowed to lie down, kept by men who were up at five and will be up at five tomorrow. None of it was put on for anybody. It is simply still there, in a field, this afternoon, which is the most reassuring thing I know about Britain and the whole reason I keep driving to gates. Dave goes home tonight. Keith stays till Saturday. He has not come down. Nelson has not looked up. Hector has looked up at the goat on the roof eleven times by the farmer's count and has not yet decided whether it is a threat, which is the longest he has ever taken to decide anything, and the first time in four years he has had something to think about that was not the donkey.