WHEN Kevin and Amanda Taylor glimpsed the elegant white building surrounded by lakes and forest, they knew they had found their dream home. They would keep chickens, grow vegetables and enjoy the rhythm of rural France far from the rat race in Britain.

Last week, however, that dream had turned into a nightmare. The Taylors fear for their lives and the safety of their two young daughters because of the lead shot that rains down on them from a neighbouring gun club, with which they are locked in a bitter dispute.

It is not the noise from next door that has poisoned their idyll so much as the lead pellets that fall “like hailstones” on their garden five days a week. Their land is also strewn with bits of clay pigeons.

“We are prisoners in our own home,” said Kevin, a 45-year-old former design consultant, brandishing a bag of shards from the garden. Amanda said Francesca, her five-year-old, had protested: “Mummy, I don’t understand; why aren’t we allowed in the garden? I’ll run between the bullets.”

Hundreds of thousands of Britons have moved to France in recent years in pursuit of the good life, prompting talk of an invasion of rosbifs. Few of them, however, have settled in the Brenne, a remote wetland wilderness in central France.

This was part of its charm for the Taylors, who, instead of mingling with expatriates, wanted to learn French and fit in. Instead they found themselves embroiled in a near-farcical dispute with both the gun club and local officials.

They sold a Georgian farmhouse at Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex, for “a lot of money” and moved into the five-bedroom manor house near Mézières-en-Brenne early last year.

“England is full of social problems these days and we thought this would be a much nicer place to bring up the children,” said Amanda, 41, who had worked as a public relations director for a City bank and now helps to teach English at the local school.

They were wrong. The first time that Amanda was peppered with spent lead pellets, she had been in the garden with India, her three-year-old daughter, who was terrified by the shooting. Amanda went in tears to see Jean-Louis Camus, the mayor. It turned out that he was a member of the gun club and a friend of its owner.

“He was very nice to me,” she said. “He said, ‘A bit of lead won’t do you any harm.’ But he agreed to tell the club to make sure that people shot in the other direction.”

The torment continued, however, and in May last year, when Kevin was hit on the back of the head by a piece of clay pigeon, the couple summoned the police.

The police did not seem particularly concerned. It turned out that some of them were gun club members, too. Even though Kevin had kept the clay pigeon shard as evidence, they said he had probably been hit by a piece of wood thrown up by his lawn mower.

Things went from bad to worse: lead kept on raining down on the Taylors and the authorities kept on fobbing them off. A policeman eventually came to investigate, but there was so much lead falling that day that he did not want to approach the end of the garden for fear of being shot.

The couple got a lawyer who appealed in court last week for the closure of the shooting range, but the judge refused to close it, despite its violation of regulations requiring a 275-yard security zone.

The Taylors were instead invited to seek damages if they could present a bailiff’s report that lead had landed on their property. To them, this seemed surreal: at great expense they had already produced several such nota-rised reports as evidence.

“They just don’t want to take the decision to close down the club,” said Amanda, “because of the connections of the people involved.”

The mayor of Mézières-en-Brenne did not return phone calls last week. The gun club would not comment, saying the dispute was being handled in court. The local gendarmerie was similarly reticent.

It turns out that the Taylors are not the only ones to have been affected by the gun club. A previous owner of the house, an Englishman, died after electrocuting himself when he plugged in a fountain with wet feet. His partner blamed stress and sleepless nights caused by arguments with the gun club.

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