Sorry, that wasn't a brilliant explanation. Our neighbours are elderly and live in a bungalow. We live in an adjacent smallholding with 15 acres of woodland, and a few fields, all managed for biodiversity. The five poplars stood about 20 foot from their house, but thankfully the one that came down fell away from their house, crashing over the boundary into our field. It took down a section of our fence and boundary wall. They put in an insurance claim, but it would only pay for disposing of the one that fell, and not for removing the others that were at risk of falling in future, so they had to pay for that element. And it wouldn't pay to repair the boundary, unless we claimed it on our insurance who then claimed against them (and our home insurance only covers the house and domestic curtilage and not the field).
The insurance recommended firm was going to charge £1200+vat per tree, which was beyond their means, so they found a local arb who has been felling them this week. They could only safely fell them into our field, and that meant taking down a section of another fence to give them access, and allowing their contractors to work on our land for four days with a lot of mess and noise. Our neighbours had nowhere to store the timber, nor any use of it, so they'd have had to pay for disposal if we hadn't adopted it. We said it was fine to leave us the timber, and we'd cover the cost of repairing the boundary fence/wall.
Unrelated to that, we have four sizable ash trees with die-back. We need to fell at least two of them (one overhangs our driveway, the other is on a boundary with the same neighbour and overhangs his greehouse) which was why I had asked the same guys whether they could fell and plank them. However, I had been told poplar was not good wood for working with, so until I read this thread I had not considered planking any.