How two small fence panels cost Katherine and Graham their £45,000 savings… and ended up in a police cell on a Sunday night

According to the estate agent’s details, the three-bedroom dormer bungalow is situated in ‘a quiet location at the end of a cul-de-sac… in the heart of a charming coastal village’.

That this part of Norfolk has its attractions is beyond doubt. A short distance from the sea and not far from Sandringham House, the royal family’s beloved retreat, Snettisham has an award-winning pub and a beautiful church whose 175ft tower has been a landmark for sailors sailing the Wash for almost 700 years.

Yet this pretty village is the setting for a neighbourhood dispute that has been going on for five long years. The owners of the cul-de-sac bungalow, currently for sale for £375,000, and the residents of the neighbouring property are embroiled in an increasingly bitter feud.

With the help of lawyers, lawsuits and the police, a pensioner has spent 12 hours in a police cell under threat of prosecution, leaving him and his wife destitute.

The issue that has caused so much concern? Two small wooden fence panels, each costing just £80.

Perhaps it is only in this country, where the Englishman is known to live in his castle, that a few inconspicuous pieces of wood can cause so much offence.

The escalating saga has now left pensioners Graham and Katherine Bateson – owners of the neighbouring property – spending their entire £45,000 savings on legal fees, with Graham also at risk of a criminal record.

The couple have not said whether they regret the “war over the fence panels,” but it would be understandable if they did.

As well as the financial toll, as Mrs Bateson put it: ‘This has been five years of sheer hell. It’s more the health issues that it’s caused. It’s going through your head every five minutes. We’ve just got back from holiday and as soon as we walked home we were going “whoosh” because it’s so awful.’

Ironically, it was the tranquility of the area that attracted the Batesons and led them to purchase their bungalow in 1987. The couple say the property, located at the end of a cul-de-sac, was sold with a shared driveway with their neighbours and a “distinctive boundary” between them.

This was necessary, they say, because the two houses are built in such a way that they had to cross part of the neighbor’s driveway to be able to park in front of their own house.

The couple insist the arrangement ran smoothly for decades, even when Wendy Leedham and her husband Roger bought the house next door to them for £227,500 in 2007.

Relations were always ‘civilised’, with the two couples sharing a table at another villager’s wedding reception. After Mr Leedham, chairman of the local school governors, died in 2014, they even mowed the lawn for their widower and kept a spare key in case of emergency.

But things suddenly spiralled out of control, they allege, when Mrs Leedham got a new partner who wanted to park his car in the driveway next to hers.

In 2019, the Batesons were shocked when they returned from a trip to find that, without warning, two wooden fence panels with curved trellis had been erected between the two properties. Bricks had been removed from their paving to install the support posts.

Fearing that it would become difficult for them to park their car in front of their house, the Batesons asked Mrs Leedham to stop the work.

Mrs Bateson said: ‘I went outside and said, “Please stop that”, but they never answered. We went inside and called the solicitor and then all hell broke loose.’

The Batesons applied for an injunction to have the panels removed, claiming they were obstructing their driveway. But their neighbour successfully fought the claim after taking legal advice which said they could stay.

The feud – and the sky-high costs – dragged on, with both sides paying for lawyers before turning to mediation in an attempt to resolve the dispute.

Mrs Leedham sadly passed away from cancer at the age of 74 in 2021, but the dispute did not end with her passing. Six months after her passing, mediation ended in a ruling that a new deed should be drawn up showing the boundary between the two bungalows, meaning that the fence could remain.

But the Batesons were not about to leave it at that, claiming that the mediators had said their neighbors would have to conduct a property inspection before the fence would be allowed to stand. That never happened.

Instead, the Batesons paid for their own investigation.

In a written report, the surveyor concluded that the developer of the property intended to share access via the two driveways.

“Access to the driveway of (the Batesons’ home) is to be gained by driving across the front portion of the driveway to (Mrs. Leedham’s home),” he wrote in 2022. “I believe this was the developer’s original intention and therefore constitutes an implied easement… Therefore, no amenity such as a fence can be erected on such a boundary.” Months later, when that failed to satisfactorily resolve the dispute, a frustrated Mr. Bateson, who has no previous criminal convictions, took matters into his own hands and removed the fence himself.

He says, “A police officer showed up and spoke to Wendy’s son. I went outside to move my car and the police officer came running and grabbed me by the arm and arrested me on the spot.”

As the 75-year-old great-grandfather and former truck driver told the Mail this week: ‘I’ve been arrested for vandalism.

‘I was taken to King’s Lynn police station and they took my DNA and fingerprints and put me in a cell until almost midnight. There was a toilet, a blanket and a plastic cage. They locked me up for 12 hours on a Sunday with no food.’

Although the charges were eventually dropped, the Crown Prosecution Service decided that prosecution was not in the public interest. But the case was not over yet. With Mrs Leedham’s house now up for sale, the matter remains unresolved.

The Batesons say they can’t relax and enjoy their retirement in the home they worked so hard to build. Although the properties are currently unfenced, Mrs. Bateson says she and her husband are terrified of the changes that new homeowners will bring.

“We are still living in fear that they will put up another fence when there shouldn’t have been one in the first place,” she said. “The situation is that they are still trying to force us to put a solid line between the borders. We don’t know where we are now. This is chaos, torture and purgatory. Sometimes I feel like throwing myself under a bus.”

The couple say that now that they have exhausted their money, they no longer have the financial resources to continue the fight. Their fears about money and how they will fund the rest of their retirement are overwhelming.

“We’re living hand to mouth now,” said Mrs. Bateson, who worked as a factory supervisor for a company that made windows. “That money was supposed to help us live. You don’t know when you’re going to have to get the car fixed or if you’re going to need carers. We don’t have it now — it’s all gone.”

It is unlikely that this revelation will garner much sympathy from those on the other side of the fence.

Although the family of the late Mrs Leedham would not comment on the feud, they maintain that she did nothing wrong and only put up the fence for her ‘privacy’.

“We’re not interested in stooping to Graham Bateson’s level,” said one family member. “The family is still grieving. They’ve been dragged through this for the last four or five years while Wendy was terminally ill.”

However, there are many in the village who sympathise with the Batesons. Rather than seeing them as the architects of their own plight, they say the estate they live on, formerly owned by the council, is plagued by problems over access rights.

“It’s a pig’s ear,” said parish councillor David Bocking, 90, who has lived in the village all his life. “There are other houses that have rights of way to the other houses above the gardens, and that’s also causing a lot of fuss because they were never graded when they were first sold by the council.”

Brenda Smith, 85, who previously lived in Mrs Leedham’s bungalow, added: “It’s a very sad situation. I really feel for Kate and Graham. It’s been awful for them. They’ve spent all that money and achieved nothing. I’ve only had the house for three years but there was absolutely no problem with the driveway. It was shared.

“They are lovely people. They would help anyone. I went on holiday once and my granddaughter left the door open and they came and locked it.”

Retired police officer Martin Burden, 77, who lives with his wife in a bungalow opposite the Batesons, says he understands why Bateson took matters into his own hands.

“He shouldn’t have done it, but in the same situation the owners of that property shouldn’t have taken his bricks out to put the fence up and nothing was done about it,” he said. “It’s completely ruined their lives – £45,000 they’ve lost.”

A staggering amount of money to spend on an endless feud with a neighbor the Batesons once considered a friend.