Purple area is our entrance to our garden. Green is what's on property deeds. Black is the fence put up as agreed with agent during property purchase (completed weeks ago). Agent was involved & neighbour. Neighbour (red line top left of pic) has no access rights. Agent selling persuaded us to fence the area off & extend it to the stream - we don't own the bit by the stream (wavy blue line). This is unregistered land that no-one knows who owns. We don't think we have true rights to extend to the stream & boundary is just before this.
Neighbour top left has an allotment (wavy red line) on right of our property,). He agreed as part of the sale that he would go around the road to access this area. Allotment is also unregistered land but he uses it. Previous owner said he had no access rights across her land & there was never any agreement that he could. Clearly he was going across though.
The neighbour at the bottom left (red line) his garden ends on the red line & he has no access however our garden ends before the stream & so really nor do we.
However the area at the stream needs some sort of maintenance so we were hoping we'd be able to use this area & tidy it up.
Now we were persuaded to put a fence just inside of the boundary on neighbours side as agent didn't think that the boundary was quite right, to be fair it probably wasn't. We were supposed to butt the fence up at the bottom near the stream against a small building (an old sluice & we don't know who's owns that probably the same person as owns the riverbank). However we didn't because there was so much overgrowth.
BUT now the top neighbour has forged through the overgrowth & is now walking through the side of our garden fence area & has made it into a path. (Red dots on side of the fence).
We spoke to the solicitor we used with the purchase & he said that this neighbour has no access rights at all & we should just reposition the fence to the original boundary.
So....We could either do what was originally planned & extend the fence to the sluice gate which will effectively block access & live with the fence as it is or just take the fence we put in back to the original boundary.
Note that nothing has been changed on the land registry, that boundary bordering the end of the other gardens is clear & that's where their gardens stop, no access rights over our land. The bottom left neighbour though could probably access the stream & I think they've come to an arrangement that top neighbour can use his land to go through to the stream & access his allotment. However he's effectively going through our garden to get to it (other side of the fence).
It's clear where the end of his garden is because he'd put a gate in at the foot of his garden (which is why we questioned access in the first place).
I don't think it's clear where the boundary is exactly BUT what is clear is that top left neighbour has no access rights across our property.
We don't really care in all honesty about losing a little bit of land to the side of our garden but we do really mind this neighbour walking around the fence & across the stream. It's just weird.
One thought was that we could position a composting bin behind the fence or forge out a space for one in the fence. This would effectively prevent access too.
It's about 2-3 ft from the original boundary.
Bottom left neighbour doesn't care what we do, but is chummy with top left neighbour.