Goose named Gandalf is ‘kidnapped’ – leaving pal ‘Ryan Gosling’ devastated

What has happened to Gandalf the goose?

They’re the words on everybody’s lips near Basted Millpond in Kent after the bird was allegedly stolen.

A passerby claimed he saw someone bundle the bird into the boot of a car at about 7pm last Tuesday.

Since then there have been no clues to his whereabouts – and the local landlord has resorted to putting up a £400 reward.

‘Everyone loves those geese,’ Benjamin Mcconnachie, who is publican at The Plough in Basted, Kent, said. ‘People come from Borough Green, Platt, Crouch and other villages to visit them, and bring their children.

‘Nothing like this has ever happened before. It’s always been such a nice community.

‘This has left everybody very sad and upset. Whoever did this is the scum of the earth, and we need to catch them.’

Benjamin, who has run the pub for 13 years, has put up the £400 reward for information leading to the conviction of the ‘low-life’ who took Gandalf.

The goose mysteriously appeared at Basted Millpond in Borough Green two years ago and is thought to have been released by someone who could no longer look after him.

He lived initially with a family of wild greylag geese but when they flew off, he was left all alone.

Geese are sociable creatures and Gandalf seemed to be going into a decline, ‘moping about’ and looking miserable. He is a Embden goose, which are too heavy to fly.

A local couple decided to buy him a companion and travelled to Norwich to buy Ryan, named after Ryan Gosling. The pair have been inseparable until Gandalf’s kidnapping.

A driver, who had stopped in a lay-by in Basted Lane, witnessed the incident and told villager Nigel Sheepwash that he had seen a black estate car pull up by the pond and take Gandalf.

Nigel had left to collect his wife from the train station at 6.50pm and spotted both geese in their regular place, but when he returned at about 7.20pm, one had gone, and he raised the alarm.

He began searching, then contacted the neighbors who looked after the geese, to see if they had removed one. They then called the police.

He said: “The van driver came down and told me what he had seen. Stupidly, I didn’t take his contact details. I’m kicking myself now.

“All he said was that he had seen something fly out of the passenger window, and then saw the passenger get out. He didn’t even say if that was a man or a woman.”

Benjamin said that a car had raced past his pub at speed that evening.

“He was doing 70 or 80mph, which is what brought my attention to it,” he said.

He checked his pub’s CCTV and found an image of a dark-colored estate car as it sped past at 7.01pm.

The incident has unleashed a torrent of both sadness and anger on social media, where villagers have turned into sleuths to track down the villains.

Many have reposted the CCTV image of the car on the Facebook pages of neighboring villages in the hope that someone will be able to identify the thieves.

One of them, Julie Dervish, said: “We’re all very upset. I’m in my 50s now and live in Platt, but when my children were young, we used to visit Basted Mill all the time to see the wildlife.

“It’s is a bit off the beaten track. It’s not the sort of place that you would casually pass, so the thieves must have visited and seen the geese before and planned the theft.’

The couple who bought Ryan as a companion for Gandalf were concerned that he too would go into a decline now left on his own.

So on Thursday, they travelled to Bournemouth and got another goose, who has now been released at Basted Mill. His name is Gengoose Khan

They do not want to be identified, but one said: ‘If a driver had hit a goose and killed it, stopped, and done the right thing, we would have been sad, but not angry.

‘But any deliberate act of violence against wildlife, as this seems to have been, is just deplorable.

‘We can’t comprehend the mentality of the lowlife that would do such a thing.’

Kent Police said it is investigating.

Basted Mill was a paper mill, dating from 1750. It was demolished in 1999, and the site was redeveloped with 29 houses by Crest housebuilders.