A couple have blown their £45,000 life savings over a long-running dispute with a neighbour about two fence panels.
Graham and Katherine Bateson objected when Wendy Leedham put the barrier up on the shared driveway between their two bungalows in 2019.
The couple insisted the properties had what was described as a ‘featureless boundary’ when they bought their home in 1987 and launched litigation.
This dragged on for nearly three years when a mediation hearing ruled the fence could stay.
Mrs Leedham didn’t survive to see her victory because she died months before the decision.
But her family retained the right to keep the panels – leading a frustrated Mr Bateson to spend a night in police cells in 2022 when he took matters into his own hands and took them down.
The Crown Prosecution Service eventually dropped the case but the couple now fear the barrier will go back up after Mrs Leedham’s family put the three-bedroom property on the market for £375,000, with the sales brochure boasting it ‘occupies a serene spot’.
‘We’d lived here for 32 years without any problems with the previous neighbours. They all agreed it was a shared drive,’ said Mrs Bateson, 73, a retired factory supervisor.
‘We bought it as a shared drive, that’s how it was explained to us and sold to us.
‘I don’t understand how you can have all the checks done legally and 30 years later it comes back to bite you on the bum.
‘To have all your life savings taken away like that, when you knew you were right in the first place.’
The Batesons allowed a previous neighbour to put up a short run of panelling between the properties in Snettisham, near King’s Lynn in Norfolk, in 1995 to stop her children running out in front of cars.
But Mrs Leedham, who moved there some years later, extended it with two low panels with curving trellis on top in 2019.
Mr and Mrs Bateson applied for an injunction to have it taken down, arguing it obstructed the entrance to their drive. But their neighbour successfully countered the claim after obtaining legal advice that said she could put up the panels.
The feud dragged on, with both parties paying for lawyers, until the mediation which ruled in November 2021 – six months after Mrs Leedham’s death – that a new deed should be drawn up showing the boundary between the two bungalows, meaning the fence could stay.
Mr Bateson, 75, said the shared drive and open boundary were subsequently confirmed in a surveyor’s report, leading to the retired window cleaner’s decision to take it down in September 2022.
‘I took the fence down and I got arrested for criminal damage,’ he said.
‘They had me locked up for 12 hours on a Sunday with no food until midnight.’ The charges were dropped in December last year after the CPS said a prosecution would not be in the public interest.
The Batesons later decided they had to end the legal battle because they had exhausted their funds.
‘We saved and worked hard. It’s all gone now,’ Mr Bateson said.
But a legal glitch remains after the Land Registry recently rejected the revised deed because the Bateson’s signatures were not properly witnessed and now they have the prospect of new owners reigniting the feud.
Mrs Leedham’s home is being sold by estate agents Sowerbys, whose 12-page brochure makes no mention of the legal tussle and states: ‘This chalet bungalow, surprisingly spacious, occupies a serene spot at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac.’ Mrs Bateson added: ‘We’re still living in fear they will put another fence up when there shouldn’t have been one in the first place.’ Mrs Leedham’s family said they would not be responding to the Batesons’ claims.
Sowerbys were also approached for a comment.