The disputed land is four metres wide and two hundred and eighty long. It is on the outside of a bend, so it floods twice most winters, and the soil that is argued over is not the soil that was argued over in 2007. It has been in and out of three courts. The papers, stacked, come to just under a metre.
Nobody involved will say what they want. They will each say, carefully, what the other side cannot be allowed to have.
How it started
In 2007 the Ardwick family put up a fence. The Nevel Angling Association had walked that bank since 1934 under an arrangement with the previous owner that existed entirely in the form of a Christmas card. The water company, which owns the abstraction point two fields downstream, wrote to both of them to say that it took no position, and has since taken four.
The first hearing lasted a day and a half. The judge suggested, in terms that appear in the transcript as a single dry sentence, that the parties might walk the bank together. They did not.
A right over a riverbank is not a right over land. It is a right over land that moves, and the law has never fully agreed to notice that the land moves.
What the river did about it
Between 2011 and 2019 the Nevel took roughly a metre and a half from the outside of the bend and put most of it back a hundred metres downstream. Under the doctrine of accretion, gradual change belongs to the riparian owner; under avulsion, a sudden change does not. The whole case now turns on whether nine winters of erosion is gradual.
An expert for the anglers measured it in millimetres a year and called it gradual. An expert for the family produced a night in February 2014 when four hundred millimetres went at once and called that the whole event. Both were, on their own terms, correct.
- The 2014 survey exists only as a set of photographs with no scale in them.
- The 2019 survey was taken from a drone that the other side says was flown too high.
- No survey at all exists for 2008, which is the year everyone now wishes they had.
What it has cost
The angling association has spent, on its own figures, more than it collected in subscriptions in the same period. The family remortgaged in 2016. The water company's costs are not public and, when asked, its solicitors wrote to say that they were not material, which is not the same as small.
The part that is not about the bank
On the second afternoon I spent in Ardwick's kitchen he stopped talking about easements and said that his father had fished that bend with a man who is now the association's treasurer, and that the two of them had not spoken since a funeral in 2009. The treasurer, asked about it a week later, described the same funeral, the same row, and a different reason for it.
The hearing listed for March will be the eleventh. It concerns costs.