A judge’s patience wore thin when he was asked to rule on a property dispute over an area of land so small that, when shown on the plan of the property, ‘if you had a Mont Blanc pen, with the finest nib available, the line you drew would represent an area of land about the width that we are talking about’.
The case was brought after a man sought to move his fence 30 inches further from his own house and this was opposed by his neighbour.
Ironically, after the case was decided in the Court of Appeal, and with legal costs running into six figures, the decision was that the boundary should remain where it had been all along.
The Court declined to award costs to the successful neighbour because she had only appealed the original decision (which went marginally against her) in order to recover her legal costs. Her success has cost her more than £1,000 per inch of land saved. The unsuccessful neighbour’s costs are said to be three times as much.
This was the latest in a spate of what seem to be trivial boundary disputes that have reached the courts, and there is every sign that the judiciary is losing patience with the participants.