For the past 40 years, Richard Clarke has fished for lobsters, crab, herring and bass off the coast of Sea Palling in north Norfolk.

Now, he fears his days as a fisher are numbered after a dispute with holiday home owners about whether he should be allowed to store his fishing boats in a boatyard he uses near their properties.

North Norfolk district council (NNDC) has ruled that it is not lawful for fishers to continue to use the field off a road, the Marrams, to store casual boats for fishing and recreation, despite acknowledging that the site has been used by fishers for more than a decade to store their small vessels.

“We will find it hard to continue our fishing operations if we don’t have the use of this field,” said Clarke, 55, a third-generation fisher who has been storing his boats in the small shingled yard near the sea for 35 years, alongside the boats of his brother Jason, another fisher. “It’s so important to us. Without it, we couldn’t operate – it would be the end of our fishing careers.”

He said he had received a letter from the council “many years ago” stating that he was allowed to store his vessels on the site due to an 18th-century covenant, the White Herring Fisheries Act 1771. “It was an old law that said that any fisherman could store fishing gear on land 200m from the high-water mark.”

Sea Palling parish council wrote to NNDC to say it would be a “travesty if the boat yard disappeared”.

“This matter has aroused considerable indignation from local people,” the parish council wrote. “There have been boats stored … along the Marrams for over a hundred years. The parish council feels that it is iniquitous for people who own only holiday cottages in the village to try to alter something which has been in situ for several decades and is integral to the way of life here.”

Matthew Fernando, who runs the Lifeboat Tavern pub, said: “The parish council and the whole village is definitely behind the fishermen.”

He thinks people who buy second homes in Sea Palling should expect to be disturbed by fishers transporting their boats in and out of the sea with the tide, during the night. “If you buy a house in a fishing village by the sea, you can’t expect to try to get rid of historic fishermen who have been here for years and years. Fishing is a dying trade and it’s a beautiful thing to see these boats come in and out. If you’re upset about that, go buy a house [further] inland.”

He said the dispute was causing unnecessary tension in the village: “How can you want to take away culture and history from a seaside village? These are guys who are just working day to day to get as much as they can to survive and live. When you eat fresh lobster in a restaurant, while you’re on holiday, where do you think it comes from?”

Villagers do not find the noise of the boats disturbing, he said, because they have heard it all their lives. “It wouldn’t wake me up. It’s not noisy.”

In the complaint submitted to the district council, one objector said: “The landowner appears to want free reign to do anything he wishes –not necessarily related to historical small scale local fishing.”

The NNDC planning officer concluded that the owner of the boatyard had provided “insufficient” evidence that the land had been used to store casual boats for fishing and recreation for a “sufficient length of time to enable a lawful development certificate to be granted”.

Clarke said he is feeling very uncertain about what this decision will mean for him. “It’s a huge worry at the moment, hanging over our heads. We’ve always fished, it’s in our blood. It’s just second nature.”

The Guardian understands that the owner of the site intends to appeal against the decision.