The county council insist the unmade track leading to my house is nothing to do with them, while the parish council change their position depending on how they feel on the day.
If they want to boss us about, they infer they are leasing the land from Surrey county council, along with the rest of the village green, and therefore we must do what they say when we are using it.
So, for example, they charged us for a weekly permit when we put a skip outside our house while renovating.
At other times, including when the track needs repairing, they infer that it is not really that much to do with them. They chuck the odd bag of gravel into the holes but otherwise let the rainwater build up all winter.
The builder boyfriend digs makeshift trenches to drain the flooded road, and helps old ladies living on their own to bail water away from their doors.
When we contact Surrey county council to point out that the parish council they are leasing the village green to are refusing to maintain a track running through it, Surrey county are sympathetic to us on the phone.
When we tell the parish this, they say that really and truly, Surrey county ought to do more.
I also had a nice letter from the chair of the parish council recently to say that if I didn’t like the track to my house, then I could always stop using it. The tantalising possibility was held out that the parish might resolve the matter for me by confiscating my right to use the track. They said they intended to verify the exact status of this supposed right of way I claimed I had.
So I sent them my copy of a Land Registry statutory declaration of a right of way across the village green to my home going back to the 1970s, lodged with and stamped by Surrey County Council highways.
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