Purchase: fee simple, freehold, clean title – no easements.
Digging: spade cuts neighbours’ phone line, just 100mm down.
Conversation: neighbour waves papers, proclaims “we have an easement”.
Discovery: All of their services (power, water, phone) run under my land.
Legal: lawyers confirm there is no easement.
Digging: though council files and historic titles.
Conversation: ends with neighbours avoidance.
Discovery: my property had an easement to access a right of way over their land.
Concern: the council made it a condition when my neighbours subdivided, for there should be no reversing of cars on a road with so many schools.
Dodgy: the easement was illegally surrendered by a lawyer who has a censure against him for “acting without authority”.
Hypocrisy: those neighbours who removed the right of way at all costs, run the preschool to my left, and collect their grandchildren from the school to my right – all on the road I am forced to reverse on.
Resolution: is yet to come, but I can conclude that there is no ease to be found in easements.
There is a lovely archaic lexicon pertaining (legalese already) to land title documents. I have always found the terminology compelling, particularly in Ireland where land titles date back a little bit. I rule that you call an adjournment to your concerns and pause to evaluate the poetic possibilities of Vinculum; Cadastre; Indefeasibility; Servient tenement (central to your case); Folio (qualified or limited); Strata; Good Root (I kid you not) of Title; Lien and then the humped backs of monks or Dickensian scribes laying down this most precise wordage having chased a goose around the orchard for the necessary quill. At ease good poet, let the lawyers do what they do best and you do what you do best.