Chapter 11: From 1992 to the Present Day
2012: railings on West Hill
On Monday, 20 February 2012, at about 8.00 p.m., a minor catastrophe occurred, in that a heavy object came hurtling down the West Hill, penetrating the mesh fencing at the top of the cliff and hitting the back of the house. Here, it did considerable damage, breaking two of the struts of the railings of the little upstairs balcony that I had installed and shattering the glass of one of the lower panes of the French windows, leaving fragments of glass scattered all over the carpet of the room inside. I recall that I was standing at the sink in the kitchen at the time, only a few feet from where the impact occurred, and it was jolly lucky that the object didn’t hit the house a few feet lower, where it might have broken the window over the sink and I would have been severely injured by fragments of flying glass.
It turned out that the object was a wheel, ironically the wheel of a motorcycle, and I suppose it had just been rolled down the West Hill from near the cafe at the top as a joke, gathering speed as it descended so that it had acquired a lot of momentum by time it came over the edge of the cliff and hit the house. I contacted the police, but they weren’t able to do much. I also had the glass repaired by Croft Class, who made a really poor job of it, leading to repeated leaks in subsequent years which were finally sorted out by Woodbase in 2015. The balcony was repaired by R. Gregory of Tivoli Forge, who did the work so well that you hardly notice it.
Rear garden wall
More important, I took up the fact that the wheel had penetrated the mesh fence on the West Hill with the Council, who agreed that, with the fence in such a decrepit condition, there was a real risk of someone running down the hill, falling over the cliff edge and breaking their neck, and that it needed to be replaced. They therefore agreed to erect a new set of metal railings along the perimeter of the land on the West Hill that I had been maintaining since 1992 and, slightly to my surprise, they agreed to pay for the entire cost of this. The then Parks Officer, Martin Jencks, urged me to make an adverse possession claim for the piece of land between the railings and the edge of the cliff, which I ultimately implemented in April 2021 through the solicitors, Cripps LLP of Tunbridge Wells, and which was ratified by the Land Registry in July 2022.