Neighbours think my drive is a right of way

I would think that they dont really care if the OP was living alone, its more that they just dont care

This stuff is evil and quite pretty

https://www.gardeningexpress.co.uk/mahonia-japonica-bealei?ff=10&fp=18999&gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI4smqveGyhQMVCZRQBh3kog8REAQYAyABEgLefvD_BwE

This is an excellent idea 😂

Yanbu! If that was my house my dog would bark every time they did it and drove me crazy! I’d put something in the flower bed to prevent this.

They may or may not see OP as a walk-over (pun not intended!) but she is acting like it if she won't go and have a normal, polite conversation with her neighbours.

Who knows if you may or may not need to take further steps after you say something - but it seems very silly to me to pay out for fencing, plants, trellis etc if a simple "Please don't use my driveway" would suffice.

@GasPanic lots of new builds seem to have these silly layouts nowadays and they seem to set up asking for issues when it would of been easier to work another way, but prob saved them £100 and they don’t have to live there

In that case it would be quite reasonable for you to plant/re-plant that area with some nice prickly hedging or bushes, rosa rugosa is tall strong growing really thorny with nice flowers and big hips in the autumn ideal, and not as pointed (pun intended) as planting Pyracantha.

You need to put something very poky there so that jumping risks injury.

Pyracantha- it's not called Fire thorn for nothing.
Evergreen, white flowers in spring and lots of bright red/ orange berries in the autumn and lots of sharp thorns

And a fence. A wooden picket fence with a pointy top.

That should do the trick.

You need to stop neighbour using your land for access to their house as I believe if they do it for a number of years ( 10?, 15?) they are establishing a ''precedent'' which will give the owner of that house legal right to use it.

We had virtually the same set up with our old house, complete with lazy shortcut takers!

Could you move your black bin there?

Rose bushes, hawthorn or other spiky plant will do the same job whilst not making your house look like a WW1 battle site.

You need to plant it up - if you plant, you don't look like you are building abarrier but just 'gardening' - it will take a little time to grown but hawthorn or rose hedging bushes are cheap to buy at 4ft tall which should be too high for them to jump unless they are very athletic.

I would probably put a picket fence all the way along the rhs of the drive labelled one, with a gate in it. They will then probably just walk diagonally across the grass from the parking space to their front door.

My guess is they will do that anyway in summer. So if you do it say around the end of summer then it won't look like you are doing it to stop them.

Who actually owns the grass in front of the houses ? Why cannot they just lay their own path in this grass ? That is what I would do.

Edit : The additional benefit of a picket fence there is that it would not look out of place. You do have the issue of how to secure the gate though.

Whilst I agree that speaking to them first would be the reasonable thing to do I'm still not sure that I would.
I think they I'm doing this because they see the op as an easy target, in other words they are already behaving like bullies and not being reasonable if you have a conversation with them about it your kindness and reasonableness will be seen as weakness and they will be incentivised to try to dominate you further.
I think I would be erecting decorative barriers.

You said they just jumped higher to get over your plants. I’d be tempted to put in a little horse jump, with the poles that fall off if caught, and raise it slightly every week. I’d love to see how high they’d be able to go.

Is the flowerbed shared ie the boundary line is along the middle of it or yours (or theirs)? As this influences where you place your fence/trellis. If you fence along your edge you could be giving up a bit of your land by having all the flowerbed on "their side ". If it's shared you can hopefully place a trellis right down the middle and grow pretty stuff on your side! It will need to be above knee height though or they'll just step over it.

I stopped my neighbours cats from walking on part of my garden by squirting them with a water pistol.

Maybe you can try something similar.

Oh, maybe they are arseholes then! I would still speak to them first, but if they continue then definitely put up as many obstacles as you can. Prickly shrubs, bear traps, razor wire, the lot!

I did have neighbours attempting to go through small plants so at a time when I knew they were around I put on an all in one coverall with hood and a mask (think hazmat suit) and spent a long time spraying my soil and plants. That certainly deterred them. It was soapy water.😂

I agree with this. I've had some trouble with neighbours over the years and wondered if I might be the problem. But really, they're incredibly entitled people who expect compliance with their demands, and that a woman alone will be easier to bully.

A tall spiky plant in the flowerbed should do the trick.

PYRACANTHA

berberis so good. and both are fanstadtic for wildlife.

but do check deeds that there really isn't any easement.

Plant a row of sweetcorn....grows 6ft tall in weeks or tomato plants with supports (any produce a bonus) or a blackberry Bush or raspberry canes.