That is
brilliant Bali, and really kind of you to offer help. It can be really intimidating to receive an enforcement notice from the council, and they make it sound like court action is imminent and you are automatically in the wrong. So it's really useful to be able to discuss it with someone before going into panic mode.
It must have given you a feeling of utmost satisfaction to have beaten the petty bureaucrats for whom power (as they see it) has gone to their heads.
I had something similar, though nowhere near as stressful or far reaching,a few years ago. We bought 18 acres of land with a lake on it on the outskirts of Goole. Having been neglected for many years, and unfenced, it was regarded as a public space. People wandered on and off at will, kids made dens, and a teenage boy drowned in the lake some years before we bought it. To emphasise that it was private land, and to keep our cattle in, we fenced it with stock netting and barbed wire. We then received a letter from the local council threatening enforcement if we didn't remove the barbed wire adjacent to the grass verge, which was "a hazard".
So like you I looked up my rights, and local bye laws, which said that barbed wire adjacent to a highway "
could constitute a hazard". I had a meeting with the self important enforcement officer and pointed out that surely death by drowning which had
actually happened was a real hazard. It was therefore far more important to guard against that happening again by keeping trespassers off our land, than to worry about cyclists scratching themselves on the barbed wire, an action that was rarely fatal and showed a remarkable loss of contol by the cyclist anyway as the wire was 6' back from the roadside.
Not wanting to be completely unhelpful though, I agreed to remove the barbed wire and replace it with ranch type fencing, if the council would indemnify me against any charges arising from the deaths of people climbing the fence and swimming, and consequently drowning in our lake. Surprisingly I heard no more about it.