Background – rear of our property is accessed by a private road, over which we have right of access but it isn’t owned by us or any of the neighbouring properties.  The road is used by approximately 10 properties.

Road required some maintenance, so we asked the owner of the road if it was OK if we did some repair work and they agreed.  This person lives in the property we were informed owns the road when we moved in and land registry plan shows (unless I’ve misunderstood it) that their property does indeed encompass the length of the road.  Fast forward to this weekend when it was nice enough for us to do the work, just nicely got started and one of the neighbours came out and demanded to know what we were doing as we were working on their property (apparently) and why hadn’t we asked their permission.  I explained that we’d asked permission from the owner as far as we were concerned.  He was insistent that they owned this particular bit of the road and that we needed to ask them first but that we were OK to carry on “for now”.  I later checked the land registry for their property and it shows the boundary stopping before the road.

This has really got under my skin for some reason and I want to know if the title plan on the LR site is definitive or if there can be something else that defines who owns what bit of land?  Can anyone help? Ta:)

You’ve got a repaired road and continued access to your property.

Unless you want to spend a lot of time and money getting access to deeds etc I’d just leave it and move on.

land reg is definitive, if it has the records (some are still not there). you can claim overship\right of access that isn’t shown on the land, but until its gone through the process and pushed to land reg it isn’t final (as far as I know)

they’ve misunderstood the difference between ‘right of access’ and ‘ownership’?

As above, if the works are now done I’d not worry about it

tell houseowner 1 that houseowner 2 is claiming ownership. let them sort it out.

Nothing to do with you really, but if you really want to stir things up, show him/her the LR entry and suggest they check their deeds.

@wwaswas – you’re right of course, but he’s been a bit of a dick about a couple of other things regarding the access road and I’d like to be able to put it to bed once and for all.  I’m also a bit of a dick to be honest 🙂

rhino – I think they’ve misunderstood too

@jambo – that did cross my mind, but the person that we think owns the road is a relatively old lady who lost her husband in the last year or 2 and I’d rather not upset her (& would inevitably come across as the bad guy in that kind of conversation I think!)

@martinhutch – why is it nothing to do with me?

Title plans are as definitive as you can get, but you sometimes need to read the title sheet as well as look at the plan to work out ownership, burdens, etc.

Google
House of Commons Library
Briefing Paper
NumberCBP402
10 April 2018
Private or ‘unadopted’
Roads

As oldtennisshoes says, you do need to read the text carefully. Mine says something like “with a right of way with or without vehicles over the road coloured Brown on the said plan … a right of way over the said land coloured blue. NOTE: The road coloured brown and the land coloured blue referred to are tinted brown and tinted pink respectively on the filed plan.” 🙂

As already mentioned it should be definitive and it it sounds like they have mixed up access and ownership.

land reg is definitive

But quite often incorrect

Road required some maintenance, so we asked the owner of the road if it was OK if we did some repair work and they agreed.

Does your right of access not require that the owner maintains it to an acceptable standard to facilitate said access? Or is it simply that they can’t actively prevent you? (Genuine question, I don’t know how these things work.)

For your other neighbour being a fin du cloche, a photocopy of the deeds through their letterbox should nip that in the bud, no?

a photocopy of the deeds through their letterbox should nip that in the bud, no?

No 🙂

That’s the stuff of feuds that last generations – shoving unsolicited legal documents with a ‘told you so’ note attached through people’s letterboxes

That’s the stuff of feuds that last generations – shoving unsolicited legal documents with a ‘told you so’ note attached through people’s letterboxes

A suitable precursor to shoving  turds through  though, yeah?

Does your right of access not require that the owner maintains it to an acceptable standard to facilitate said access?

Technically, we can probably ask that the owner maintains it, as to not do so is to prevent the right of access (easement) that we are legally entitled to.  Morally(?) though, we were happy to do it as it was a simple enough job and our houses were really the only ones that benefit from the repair as all the other houses exit the other way up the road.

I’m trying to avoid the feuding bit, just trying to establish how firm my footing is when I tell him to jog on next time we need to patch some potholes! 😉

why is it nothing to do with me?

It’s between the people who claim to own the land, neither of whom is you, if I’ve understood it correctly. You’re just part of a gang of community-spirited navvies.

Obviously, interjecting yourself in any subsequent property dispute could be entertaining though.

Does your right of access not require that the owner maintains it to an acceptable standard to facilitate said access? Or is it simply that they can’t actively prevent you? (Genuine question, I don’t know how these things work.)

I have a shared access road to access my house and the “owner” does not maintain the road, we also do not pay for the access. It is for the people to have the access to maintain and split costs “fairly”. This is in Scotland so the law may be different down south.

Edit. It is written like this in my deeds.

martinhutch

Member
why is it nothing to do with me?

It’s between the people who claim to own the land, neither of whom is you, if I’ve understood it correctly. You’re just part of a gang of community-spirited navvies.

dont agree with this – if you have a legal easement on that land, then it is do with you/them.. I’ve had the same on deeds in previous houses (though slightly different as there was a shared maintanence cost), it will always take 2 parties in these instances to act if one is not aware.

To be frank, the discussion around this seems more hot headed than the actual issue. My neighbour replaced a fence that im legally bound to maintain, but we had a simple poloite discussion, and then there was a new fence and i didnt have to pay a penny.. same issue, different situation..

Technically, we can probably ask that the owner maintains it, as to not do so is to prevent the right of access (easement) that we are legally entitled to. Morally(?) though, we were happy to do it as it was a simple enough job and our houses were really the only ones that benefit from the repair as all the other houses exit the other way up the road.

Right. Fair enough, cheers.

Depends on the wording of the easement. OP suggests that the responsibility to maintain falls on the owner, but he and his neighbours reached an informal arrangement to carry out the works. All good. The issue of ownership being argued only affects him in the sense that one of the neighbours has been a bit of an arse about it on the day.

Unless the arsey neighbour is right and all the properties actually own their ‘slice’ of the road, which seems unlikely.

Either way, the job’s been done and OP doesn’t really have to do anything further unless he wants to alert the landowner that arsey neighbour may have got the wrong end of the stick about his boundaries. Why he’d want to be fishing out LR records and pursuing the matter himself, I’m not sure.

we own a track, which 5 other houses have access over

it’s a dirt/gravel track

we do not have to maintain it to any level. It’s up to us what we do with it. The other houses can mend it if it’s in a terrible state, but only up to the level it is now. They cannot improve it, without our agreement. So no tarmacking, but a ton of gravel is okay.

They also do not have to contribute to the maintenance. It’s down to us. I think this bit is slightly unusual.

now, in reality I also need to get over it, so I make sure it’s okay up to my garage. The rest of it is up to them. We all have to live with it, so there’s no point in causing ructions.

OP suggests that the responsibility to maintain falls on the owner

I have no idea who’s responsible for maintenance, never even crossed my mind as we always intended to do it ourselves.  The easement just says we have a right of access for any purpose over the road in question.

Unless the arsey neighbour is right and all the properties actually own their ‘slice’ of the road, which seems unlikely.

Is exactly what he said, which makes no sense to me and has never been mentioned in 10 years of living there.  The road existed as a farm track and is owned by what was the farm (now a house) at the top of the road.  Our houses at the bottom were built first, then others were built over time.  The house of the neighbour in question didn’t even exist 30 years ago.

Why he’d want to be fishing out LR records

Just due diligence – in the first instance I dug them out to make sure I was asking the right person for permission to do the work, I then enquired further to check what was being said to me subsequently.  Doesn’t seem an unreasonable thing to do.

Is exactly what he said, which makes no sense to me

Exactly… if this was the case then the house at the end of the road would have to have a right of way over the ‘slices’ owned by the other houses between it and the [proper] road.
If you wanted some fun you could ask the arsey neighbour if he has an easement over your slice of the track!

I have no idea who’s responsible for maintenance,

Sorry – thought you said that technically you could pursue the landowner if the condition of the track prevented you from exercising your right of access under the easement. Which seems reasonable, as is your pragmatic approach to sorting the track.

Must admit, I’d probably glance at my deeds out of interest, just in case I owned a bit of the track, unlikely as that is.

In theory though, it needs to be the landowner telling Arsey Neighbour to jog on next time around. Boundary disputes are the stuff of nightmares, I wouldn’t get involved in any aspect of the argument.