Adverse possession

Being an ancient site in the middle of a village there has naturally been a lot of land 'leakage' over the centuries from the original lands that would have been with the house in mediaeval times. A loss in recent times came to light a couple of weeks ago when a land registry document arrived stating a neighbour was claiming title to a strip of land adjacent to our property. The law essentially says that if you have fenced off and used land for more than twelve years you can claim it - even if there were title deeds indicating it originally belonged to someone else. This strip of land rang a bell with me because one of the searches we did, at the time we bought the place, showed an extra piece of land. I checked with the solicitor but was told that this was not relevant. And he was right because the land had been used by the previous owner of our neighbour's property for nearly thirty years. I did some research in any case with a long-standing resident of the village who was friendly with the restorer of the house and also with the restorer's son who lives a few miles away. Essentially it turns out that the restorer had got fed up with not having a proper fence to keep livestock in and had apparently given away this piece of land in exchange for a fence. There seems to be no paperwork but this example of informal barter is now being formalised at the land registry under the 'Adverse Possession' regulations.