The recent case of a householder who took her neighbours to court over a 9ft strip of land, which mainly consists of nettles and a ditch, and won £167,000 in damages shows the importance of adhering to boundaries marked at the Land Registry.
Mother-of-one Valerie Wright built two houses on a two-acre plot in 1990 and lived in one of them with her late husband, William, but, since 2007, she has been locked in a bitter boundary battle with her neighbours over a narrow strip of grass and a ditch behind her home.
Mrs Wright claims she faced a vicious hate campaign during the arguments over the land and eventually took her neighbours to court, saying they were trespassing on her property.
However, trying to avoid court initially, Mrs Wright’s solicitor wrote to the neighbours in 2007 and asked them to stop trespassing on the land by extending their own gardens onto it ‘without licence or consent’ but they took no notice and refused to withdraw.
Then in 2010, Mrs Wright successfully argued that the true boundary to the land, which was once marked by a wire fence, ran almost 4ft to the east of a dyke at the bottom of a row of gardens backing onto Mr and Mrs Wright’s land but still the neighbours refused to budge.
They insisted they had done nothing wrong and said the boundary was clearly marked on the deeds to their homes but the court disagreed and now six of the original 11 families have now been forced to pay damages and court costs.
Not only that but the dispute has shrunk each of the neighbour’s gardens by 9ft, whereas if they had they checked properly in the first place, or taken heed of Mrs Wright’s solicitor, they would now be much better off.