IN THE television comedy The Good Life, Tom and Barbara tried self-sufficiency in the suburbs and lived in harmony with their more conventional neighbours; but that was not the way it worked out when a couple moved a selection of animals on to land outside their home in a Kent village.
Yesterday Douglas and Brenda Bryant, the conven-tional neighbours, were awarded £65,000 compensation for living next door to a menagerie of pigs, geese, cows, horses, goats, sheep and Frank and Mandy Macklin.
They had already been awarded £28,000 at Maidstone County Court, but yesterday three Appeal Court judges decided that it was not enough to recompense them for their suffering and for the drop in value of their home.
The Macklins also face legal costs that could exceed £100,000.
The Bryants moved into their dream home, The Poplars, in the village of Cliffe Woods on the Isle of Grain, near Rochester, Kent, in 1991. The 56-year-old engineer and his wife fell in love with the mature trees that flanked the property and gave it its name, the court heard.
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Their peace was shattered when the Macklins bought an L-shaped plot of land known as Sandy Banks — adjoining two sides of the Bryants’ property — at auction in 2001.
The Macklins moved dozens of livestock onto it. The animals munched through the poplars and other mature trees and ran riot through the Bryants’ garden, decimating their plants and vegetables.
Wasim Taskeen, representing the Bryants, told the court that his clients had suffered interference with the boundary between the adjoining plots of land, noise and smell from the animals and their manure, and intimidation from the neighbours. There had also been numerous incidents of trespass.
In one incident Mrs Bryant, who was recovering from cancer, was knocked to the ground when she touched an electric fence erected by the Macklins. According to Mr Taskeen, Mrs Macklin told Mrs Bryant that, if she got in her way, “she would wake up to find pigs at the end of her garden”.
Lord Justice Chadwick, sitting with Lord Justice Carnwath and Lord Justice Longmore, said that the original £28,000 award had not been enough to compensate the Bryants for the stress and anxiety they had endured as a result of their neighbours’ “deliberate and high-handed conduct”.
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Lord Justice Carnwath added that the Bryants had faced “a completely intolerable situation over a substantial period despite efforts to achieve an amicable resolution”.
The court ruled that the Bryants should be awarded enough to enable them to plant new trees along their boundary.
Outside the court Mr Bryant said the experience had been “a complete nightmare; we have not had a night’s sleep in four years”.
Since last year’s original case went against the Macklins, they have moved away from the area and the patch of land that caused their neighbours so much grief is now empty and overgrown.