A man who forged a letter to himself to make police take notice after a neighbour falsely accused him of having sex with her pig has been awarded £32,000 in damages.

Anton Barkhuysen, of Tregolls near Stithians, last week (11/11) won thousands of pounds in damages from Sharon Hamilton after a row over land led to her making defamatory statements and false allegations which led to him being arrested and and detained by police in 2013.

The judge Mr Justice Warby, sitting at Exeter, heard how Mr Barkhuysen, 72 and Mrs Hamilton, 54, had been in a long running dispute over the usage of a piece of common land near their two farms.

According to the High Court judgement Mr Barkhuysen claimed that between 2010 and 2013 Mrs Hamilton had verbally abused him and accused him of "stalking her, and of liking little girls."

The most serious allegation was that a report by Mrs Hamilton to police on New Year's Day 2013 -that she had seen him having sex with one of her pigs - had led to five officers coming to his house, arresting and cautioning him, taking personal samples and detaining him for more than five hours.

Apart from the immediate damage, Mr Barkhuysen feared the damage this had done to his reputation, and indeed it even made its way into the minutes of Stithians Parish Council.

Mr Barkhuysen also claimed Mrs Hamilton had also spread slanderous rumours about him, including telling a mutual neighbour "you need to keep an eye on your children when he is around," and that he had been arrested for "doing something unspeakable to her animals."

On another occasion she told a member of the congregation at the church she and the Mr Barkhuysen both attended that he was going to be arrested for an attempted hit-and-run attack on her, as well as saying that he "should not be around children and that she thought he was involved with the Sunday school." She was then told the church did not have a Sunday school.

And she had also made allegations to the police, which the judge found to be untrue, that Mr Barkhuysen had attempted to run her down, thrown a length of wood at her, and sat in a campervan on the common watching at her bedroom window. To the last of these, Mr Barkhuysen claimed that he was in the van playing Scrabble with his wife.

However, Mrs Hamilton claimed that a note Mr Barkhuysen wrote to himself, containing the words "YOU SICK PERVERT" were part of a deliberate attempt to have her arrested.

He denied this when admitting the forgery to police, saying he had only done it to highlight and

escalate his case, and the matter was dealt with through restorative justice.

The judge also accepted a claim by Mrs Hamilton that Mr Barkhuysen had broken her latches and chains to gain access to the common, which he felt had been wrongfully closed off.

Mr Justice Warby found that Mrs Hamilton had made "a false, entirely unfounded, and malicious accusation," and added that slanders uttered about him had been "particularly grave in nature."

He awarded the claimant £11, 000 in respect of his false imprisonment claim while dismissing a claim for malicious prosecution, and awarded two claims of £7,000 and £6,000 for slanders made to two individuals, £8,000 for harassment, and £80 for damages due to police confiscating his computer.