Pensioner evicted from her home after row with neighbour over 1ft piece of land

A pensioner has been evicted from her home after losing a five-year legal battle with her neighbour – over a 1ft strip of land.

Jenny Field, 77, was met at the door by court bailiffs and told she was being evicted, with her home set to be sold to next-door neighbour Pauline Clark.

Clark and Field were engaged in a bitter legal battle about their street in Hamworthy, Poole, Dorset, over a boundary fence that Clark erected in 2020.

Clark’s £113,000 legal fees will be covered by the sale of Field’s home, which she’s lived in since 2016.

Clark, 64, did not comment on her neighbour’s eviction, which was prompted after Field claimed her neighbour moved her fence 12 inches onto her land.

In return, Field hired her own contractors two months later and had the 6ft fence taken down. She later repositioned it to reclaim ‘her land’.

But Clark took her to court and won, with Field ordered to cover the cost of the fence she took down and two-thirds of Clark’s legal fees, about £21,000 at the time.

But Field refused to accept the outcome, and the case went back to court multiple times, sending the legal bill skyrocketing to six figures.

Last September, a county court judge dismissed Field’s final appeal, which she brought amid claims that Clark’s case had been fraudulent, which the judge described as ‘totally without merit’.

She was given a deadline of December 6 to pay the £113,000 bill or her home would be sold from under her to settle the debt.

Judge Ross Fentem said the ‘draconian order’ was a last resort, but that Field had had every opportunity to pay.

After the deadline passed, Clark’s solicitors successfully applied for an eviction notice.

Field has failed to put her home up for sale and allegedly kept sending the court emails and letters insisting her neighbour was in the wrong.

She stuck a sign on her front door stating that any attempt to evict her was invalid and that she was being harassed.

After being removed from her home, Field repeatedly rang the doorbell and asked to be let in.

She said: ‘They’ve changed the locks and won’t let me back in. How can I be evicted for something I haven’t done? I have nowhere else to go. This is my home and my property.

‘I have had five years of this rubbish. I am really upset by the whole thing. I have been put through hell by that b**** next door.’

Clark’s solicitor, Anna Curtis, previously said of the matter: ‘There has been no discussion or offer of settlement, no suggestion of refinancing or obtaining equity on the property. There has been no proper response in relation to the claim.’

Field will be allowed to go back into the home to get her belongings, and Curtis said there was more than enough equity in Field’s property for her to pay the debt and still be able to buy a comfortable retirement property mortgage free and and have cash leftover.

In passing his judgement at Bournemouth County Court last September, Judge Fentem said: ‘This is a very long-running boundary dispute. The defendant [Ms Field] has, in various ways, sought to relitigate the original case.

‘Her case is fundamentally that…the original fence was a boundary fence and that it was entirely on her land. Every attempt to relitigate has failed. She appears to be convinced that some form of fraud has taken place. There appears to be no reasoned basis for the allegation.

‘I have no confidence at all that the claimant [Mrs Clark] will be paid what she is owed except by an order for sale. This matter needs resolution; the parties need to find a way of putting the entirety of this dispute behind them. The order for sale is a last resort and Draconian remedy, but taking all the factors into account I should make an order for sale in this case.’

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