Surely one of the most bizarre incidents in movie history took place during the shooting of the 1967 film Doctor Dolittle in the chocolate-box village of Castle Combe in Wiltshire, just eight miles from Queen Camilla’s country bolthole in nearby Lacock.
With its honey-coloured Cotswold cottages strung out along the single street featured on many a postcard, calendar and jigsaw puzzle, Castle Combe is often dubbed ‘the prettiest village in England’.
But it was not quite pretty enough for 20th Century Fox.
To recreate the fictional Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, the rural seaport where Doctor Dolittle lived, the filmmakers built a concrete dam to flood the Bybrook, the river which meanders through the village and once powered the local woollen mills.
This so enraged one resident that he enlisted the help of friend Ranulph Fiennes, a member of the SAS and soon to become famous as a pioneering polar explorer, to blow the dam up, earning them both a spell on probation.
And now filming, albeit of a very different kind, is once again raising the hackles of the Castle Combe population of only 400 people.
Of late, the drones operated by gawking tourists have been an increasing problem as they buzz over the village, swooping on residents’ homes and videoing them as they go about their everyday lives.
With reports of angry confrontations and the police being called, locals have taken to putting up ‘No Drone Zone’ signs all over Castle Combe.
On a sunny afternoon earlier this week, they seemed to be doing their job, with not a ‘droner’ in sight. But although there were quite a few tourists pouting and preening for Instagram-worthy selfies in front of landmarks such as the small medieval bridge spanning the Bybrook, this was by no means a busy day.
It’s usually when weekends and bank holidays see Castle Combe jam-packed with visitors that the villagers find themselves unwitting — and very unwilling — extras in other people’s aerial videos.
‘You feel like you’re being spied on, like you’re living in North Korea,’ says retired police officer Hilary Baker who sells lemon drizzle cake and brownies from the porch of her 15th-century cottage.
She operates an honesty system, whereby visitors push the cash for whatever they have taken through her letterbox, a reminder of gentler days when the only complaints about visitors were their sheer numbers.
As long ago as 1914, one resident complained about the ‘charabancs visiting on Sundays’, and it says much about just how intrusive drones are that they are riling up a population well-used to prying visitors.
‘People forget that there are real people behind these walls,’ says Anna Roberts, who sells hampers of picnic food from her home in what was once the rectory of St Andrew’s, the village’s 13th-century church.
‘When we moved here from London in 2002 I had a newborn baby and was breastfeeding when I saw a lady pressing her nose up against the window. I gave her what I thought was a sarcastic smile but she misinterpreted it and called over her friends who all came and looked too. In the end there were about ten of them and they seemed to think I was putting on some kind of public performance.’
A new trend is for tourists to suction-cup their phones to cottage windows so that they can take shots of themselves against the backdrop of the street behind.
‘A lot of these houses have antique windows and that could easily damage them,’ says Hilary, who often has people peering through her letterbox.
‘That’s part and parcel of living in the village,’ she says. ‘But the problem with the drones comes when they start impinging on your private space and getting closer and closer as you try to gesture them away.’
As a former police officer, she is often called on by neighbours for help in dealing with tourists, such as the man whose drone had descended on a back garden where children were playing.
‘The father went out and said: ‘Please stop filming us,’ and he got a mouthful of abuse, so I went over and tried – and I got a barrage, too. He was so threatening that two total strangers who were sitting outside the pub came up to support me. Eventually I called the police and, fair play to them, they came out and deleted most of what he’d filmed.’
Another extraordinary incident unfolded when a man taking a bath reportedly noticed a drone hovering at the window. Not having mentioned the incident to his family for fear of making them needlessly anxious, he was reluctant to tell the Mail any more.
Another man told me: ‘You can get as many as two or three [drones] coming over a day. We had one hovering at our back door and trying to film inside the house. About six months ago I was doing the garden and this drone came down inches from my face, buzzing me really aggressively. I rushed out of the house and found the guy operating it out in the marketplace.
‘I think he was from China and he had this laptop and quite a sophisticated set-up. I was quite pointed about what he was doing, and put it to him bluntly. And he just waved me off.
‘We can lock our front doors to block out all the other things the visitors do but the drones are a whole other element that you just can’t escape.’
With their eerie, high-pitched whine, the drones have also pursued villagers in the street.
‘I was walking from the marketplace down to the bridge and I was followed all the way by a drone hovering just above my head,’ says Fred Winup, chairman of Castle Combe Parish Council. ‘If I’d had a walking stick I could have knocked it away.
‘The bridge is a really popular spot to fly the drones from, and you sometimes think that only a nutter would send one up above the hordes of people we get here, but they do.’
As he points out, this flouts the Civil Aviation Authority’s code of conduct which dictates that drones should never be flown above crowds or fly close to residential properties or gardens.
But there is no requirement to pass any kind of test to fly a drone weighing less than 250g. And foreign visitors are even less likely to be aware of the CAA guidelines.
‘A lot of the people with drones are very nice,’ says Fred. ‘When you approach them they apologise and stop immediately.
‘Often they’ll say they didn’t realise they were doing anything wrong, though the guy who was filming me said that and I did think it was surely pretty obvious that he was.’
Other residents describe an ‘I can do what I want and you can’t stop me’ attitude among some of the drone users.
With camera drones sold for as little as £10 online, it’s a trend that only seems likely to get worse. Those investing in more expensive models should perhaps think twice about getting too close to the wildlife in Castle Combe.
Geopolitical researcher Claire Henderson was relaxing in a friend’s garden in the early evening of Easter Sunday when a drone appeared with a crow, whose nest was nearby, in furious pursuit. ‘Unfortunately it missed, but if the crow had just brought it down without hurting anybody on the ground it would have been such wonderful karma,’ she says.
Such risks might seem worth taking for those trying to monetise their drone footage, taking advantage of the current craze for YouTube videos offering tours of locations which viewers are unable to visit themselves.
One such video about Castle Combe has been viewed 2,000 times. Promising a ‘cinematic adventure’, it boasts that it was shot at sunrise.
Judging by the description accompanying the video, the filmmaker seemed surprised that this should have met with what was clearly a hostile reaction from villagers furious at being woken as he panned close to their bedroom windows at 6am.
‘I personally wouldn’t consider travelling hours just for this village alone,’ he ranted. ‘It is known to be home to some of the worst residents in the UK.
‘Don’t buy a home in a tourist destination if you do not like tourists. Most of the locals did not understand this.’
Of course, liking visitors is one thing; having your privacy invaded by them is quite another.
‘How would people like it if we went and videoed them in their back gardens?’ asked one woman. ‘I was pegging out my washing the other day and a drone came down just a few feet above my head. It’s not a nice feeling at all.’
The frustration of locals is exacerbated by knowing that, unlike the residents of London’s Notting Hill, who have recently taken to painting their brightly-coloured houses black to make them less photogenic, there is nothing that can be done to make Castle Combe less of a draw for the droners.
All they can do is indulge in small acts of revenge.
‘I had someone come up my drive saying they thought that their drone had crashed in my garden and asking if they could come and look for it,’ says one. ‘I told them no.’
Perhaps behind the tourists’ behaviour lies the misconception that this magical place has been plonked there solely for their enjoyment. ‘People often ask me where I go at night,’ says Fred Winup. ‘It’s as though they think this is some kind of film set rather than a village with real houses.’
He’s now investigating whether it might be possible to enact some kind of byelaw to restrict the use of drones – as is in force above Queen Camilla’s home.
But for the moment, the only respite for residents comes when dusk sees the last of the day’s visitors walking the 800 yards up the sun-dappled road leading to the village’s only car park.
For a few blissful hours the skies above Castle Combe are once again populated only by the winged creatures who are its natural denizens. But all too soon daybreak will come and the birdsong and fluttering of bats will be interrupted once again by the whine of the dreaded drones.
