She Found Four Concrete Post Bases Still in the Ground

The surveyor was a woman in her forties called Anya, who arrived in a small van with equipment that impressed both households enormously and who was, from the first morning, entirely unbothered by either of them.

She spent an afternoon in Colin’s garden and, with permission that took Deb about four seconds to give and Tony about two days, a morning in Tony’s.

Then she spent a morning at the land registry and an afternoon with the 1961 estate plans at the county record office.

She produced a fourteen-page report.

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Her conclusions were these.

One. The 2016 fence was indeed not on the line shown on the 1961 deed plan. It was approximately eleven centimetres onto Colin’s side. His measurement was accurate, and she said so in a sentence that Colin has read more times than any other sentence in the document.

Two. The 1961 plan did not show the legal boundary.

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That second one is the part that Colin had not seen coming, and it is the part that Anya explained on the doorstep before he read it, because she had clearly done this before and knew what was about to happen.

The plan was drawn for identification purposes only. It shows the approximate extent of the plot. This was standard conveyancing practice at the time, it is printed on the plan itself in wording nobody reads, and it is the single most common reason this kind of dispute exists at all.

“So the plan’s no good,” said Colin.

“The plan’s no good,” said Anya. “The plan has never been any good. It was never meant to be good. People have been fighting over these plans for sixty years and every one of those fights is about a drawing that says, in the corner, that it isn’t for this.”

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Three. In the absence of any boundary agreement, the legal boundary would most likely be determined by the position of the original fence line as first erected.

Four. The best available evidence of that original line was the position of the original concrete post bases.

And Anya had found them.

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There were four.

Two under the edge of Colin’s lawn, about a spit down, which she had located with a probe and then exposed with a trowel in a way that Colin describes as “like watching somebody do surgery on my grass”.

One under the corner of Tony’s patio, visible where the slabs had settled.

One under the rockery, which nobody had known was there and which is the reason for the last line of this entire story.

She surveyed all four, and they were in a straight line, and the line they made was consistent across eleven metres.

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That line put the boundary about six centimetres onto Tony’s side of where the old fence had stood.

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Which meant this.

For the eleven years before the storm, the old fence had been sitting six centimetres onto Colin’s side of nothing — or rather, it had been sitting six centimetres into Tony’s garden. Colin had been quietly mowing, and planting, and enjoying six centimetres of Tony’s land for over a decade without either of them having the faintest idea.

Then the storm took it down. Then the new fence went up eleven centimetres further onto Colin’s side than the old one.

Net position, across two decades: Colin was owed five centimetres.

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He read that paragraph, he says, about six times.

Then he read it a seventh time out loud to Shona, who said nothing at all and then went and put the kettle on, which Colin says was the correct response and the only kind thing available.

Then he sat in the kitchen for about forty minutes.

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He has been asked what he felt and he has given the same answer every time, which is that the first thing he felt was not embarrassment.

The first thing he felt was relief, and it was enormous, and it took him completely by surprise.

“Because it was over,” he says. “That’s the only reason. It wasn’t that I was wrong — I was right, technically, by five centimetres, which is worse than being wrong. It was that there was a number on a page from somebody with letters after their name, and there was nothing left to find out.”

“Nine years of wanting to know,” he says, “and about forty minutes of knowing, and then it was just gone.”

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At about four he got up, printed two copies, walked round to the front, and knocked on Tony’s door for the second time in nine years.