Nelson neighbours at war: Homeowner says dispute with neighbour over boundary led to minor heart attack

Maitai Valley, Nelson, inset Ana Dorrington. Photo / NZPA, Tim Cuff

A woman battling her neighbour over a boundary between their rural properties said she no longer felt safe in her own home after a post holding up part of her verandah was cut down.

The dispute between Ana Dorrington and Barry McLeod once reached a level where the police Armed Offenders Squad was called out to the rural property in Maitai Valley in Nelson. Now it’s ended up in court.

Dorrington, who bought the property in late 2019, has taken her fight to the district court with the aim of settling the dispute with McLeod, who says he has done his utmost to try to settle the matter.

Dorrington claims she was once told she could buy the land in dispute for $15,000 but she declined because that was three times the amount of the valuation she’d had done.

Aged 67, and nearing retirement, she said she was now almost $100,000 in debt from trying to resolve the matter upon learning after she bought the property that small parts of it encroach on the McLeods’ land.

She has had to remortgage her home and borrow from family to fund the case.

Ana Dorrington said she’d had two minor heart attacks after her house was “attacked” during a dispute with her neighbour.

She claimed the sales agent had confirmed the position of a wire fence on the property was the boundary, but she found out after she got a legal letter from the McLeods that the advice was incorrect.

“I was alerted to the fact there may be an issue when the police showed me a map but it was not verified until a survey was done.”

That was in October 2021.

She said today she had not taken action against the agent because she could cope with only one matter at a time.

Dorrington said the hostility had taken a toll on her emotional and physical health, including that she’d had two minor heart attacks when her house was “attacked”, which led to a wilful damage charge against McLeod that he denied today had been laid by the police.

Dorrington said a post on the corner of her verandah, which encroached on to the neighbour’s land had been cut down and then the remainder ripped out.

“I’ve not felt safe in my home for a long time. I’m 67 and exhausted from it all, I’m depressed, and it hurts my heart to be in this adversarial situation,” Dorrington told the Nelson District Court today.

She was also seeking to have small parcels of land totalling 25sq m identified by the proposed new boundary survey vested to her.

Dorrington’s lawyer, Julie Maslin-Caradus, said it was an unfortunate case that had arisen after negotiations were unsuccessful to resolve issues of encroachment of parts of Dorrington’s house over a southern boundary into the neighbour’s property.

Maslin-Caradus said Dorrington wanted to formalise the boundary, which had stood unregulated for 38 years, and sought to have the McLeods share the cost of doing that, estimated to be between $25,000 and $30,000.

The McLeods were not seeking any removal of parts of her home but were against the proposed boundary adjustment.

The McLeods’ lawyer, Gerard Praat, said that when the matter arose they were initially happy for the encroachment to continue, and they didn’t see the adjustment as necessary, having lived in harmony with the previous owner for decades.

Praat said they did not want the boundary moved, but if it had to be, then they had a position on how that should happen.

The catalyst for the dispute appeared to be Dorrington’s actions to prune and axe several trees, including well-established natives on the boundary.

She believed she had consent to prune the trees, she had asked the McLeods to contribute to the costs, and it “all blew up” from there, after which the McLeods were said to have taken issue with the encroachment on to their property.

Barry McLeod then strung wire over the top of Dorrington’s house, described by her lawyer as frightening and “the first step in a pattern of punishing Dorrington for the trees”.

Maslin-Caradus argued McLeod then sawed through the roof post as further “punishment” for Dorrington’s refusal to accept a settlement offer. McLeod, who was supported in court today by his wife Maggie, said it was the only way he could put a planned fence up.

He then began to clear land at a point of the boundary encroachment for a garage, on his 6000sq m property, of which details were questioned at length in court today, prompting Judge Lawrence Hinton to question if the case was about whether a garage could be sited along the boundary.

McLeod, whose family had lived on the rural site for over a century, gave evidence of the importance of the land, how part of it was sacred because of where his late mother’s ashes had been spread, and how harmoniously he and his wife had lived with the previous owner, the late Nelson businesswoman and community leader Elspeth Kennedy, QSO MBE.

McLeod said when asked why he had not taken steps to sort the boundary matter when the previous neighbouring owner died and the family sold property that he assumed the sales agent would inform any buyer of the encroachment.

The hearing continues tomorrow.

Tracy Neal is a Nelson-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She was previously RNZ’s regional reporter in Nelson-Marlborough and has covered general news, including court and local government for the Nelson Mail.