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It took four years, nearly $200,000 in legal fees and incalculable stress, but when Mary Lou Erik looks out from her Bearspaw home onto her adjoining pond today, it’s not through the links of a five-foot tall, slapdash fence erected by her neighbour.

Erik purchased a two-acre lot at the edge of the pond, just west of 12 Mile Coulee Road on Calgary’s western border, in 2000 with her late husband, where they envisioned many years of winter ice skating and twilight canoe floats in the summer.

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That dream came crashing down in 2013, when their neighbours of eight years, Debbie McDonald and Doug Sparks, posted a “No Trespassing” sign on a floating platform just outside Erik’s home, later erecting a fence across the pond just metres away from their home.

According to a judge’s ruling from last January, the fence essentially kept the Eriks from enjoying the bulk of the pond that they had been using for more than a decade.