THE power of Facebook and the honesty of the local community have reunited a woman with her money after she dropped it in Kingsbridge.

Athena Ridley from West Charleton was shopping on Fore Street on Monday, when, unbeknown to her, £100 in cash fell out of her pocket. Luckily, Linda Lee from Kingsbridge saw it happen and sent her husband to pick it up.

‘I’m on crutches at the moment’ explained Linda, ‘so as I was getting into the car, I saw someone walk up out of the corner of my eye, and as she was outside Donovan’s I saw something fall out of her pocket.

‘I wasn’t close enough to see what it was, and several people walked past it so I assumed it was a piece of rubbish or something, but it niggled at me. When my husband had finished putting things into the car, I asked “could you do me a favour and just go and see what that is that was dropped?”.

‘He came back to the car and said it was £100 in cash. We didn’t know what to do so we drove up and around the town a few times, looking to see if we could spot the woman again, and we looked in the car parks but we couldn’t see her.

‘Eventually we thought we’d try to see if there was anyone there at the police station. They said they would put something on Facebook to try and locate the owner.’

PC Richard Loxton was the man they handed the money to and he posted on the Kingsbridge Police Facebook page about the finding just after 8am on Wednesday and by just after 9.30am, they had a lead.

Meanwhile, Athena said she noticed that she had dropped the money a little later and retraced her steps, heading back into shops she had visited, including Habit at the bottom of Fore Street.

‘I asked Dani at Habit if I had dropped the money in her shop’, explained Athena, ‘she didn’t have it but she asked me to leave my name and phone number with her just in case. She was the one who spotted the post from the police on Facebook.

‘I’m just astonished, its heart warming and I can’t find the words to describe how thankful I am. I moved here from Bedfordshire 11 years ago and now I know I made the right decision, we live in such an honest community.’

Sgt Dave Green, Kingsbridge Police, said: ‘It goes to show in a community like this, the vast majority of people are decent people. There is so much negativity in the world, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that everybody is a criminal.

‘It just goes to show that the vast majority of people here are good, decent, honest, salt-of-the-earth people.’

Within three hours of the post going live on Facebook, Athena had been called and reunited with her lost money. A great show of the power of communication and a heartwarming show of the kind of people that live in the South Hams.