Neighbour claims they have access through our wall and to drive over our land.

[custard01]

We have been approached by people buying a property near ours. They claim they have access to theirs through our boundary wall which has always been there and over our land. It has never ever been accessed this way previously.

I have checked our title plan and there is no access routes on there, just a solid boundary line all away around. But their title deeds show a dotted line through ours and straight through our garden wall.

Why would this not show on our title plan? They seem adament that they are going to be knocking our wall and edge down and driving over our land, so what do I need to do and how can I find out exactly what is what please?

Did you get anywhere with your solicitor?

If they are still in the process of buying it, have you spoken to the current owners?

Just wanted to add that a right of way granted by deed can only be removed with the grantee's consent. Thoughts that OP can simply get the rights removed by applying to court are fanciful.

How long have you lived in your house OP?

@Collaborate

Just wanted to add that a right of way granted by deed can only be removed with the grantee's consent. Thoughts that OP can simply get the rights removed by applying to court are fanciful.

But surely if a ROW exists, it should be on the OP 's deeds?

Not necessarily. When land is first registered the LR gets their information from the owners, not their neighbours.

Have you spoken to your current neighbours about this?

they probably 'amended' their copy to deceive you........

@monkeymonkey2010

they probably 'amended' their copy to deceive you........

OP has accessed the neighbour's title via Land Registry and the dotted lines are present.

I don't think anyone is quite that stupid?!

I don’t know how accurate the land registry records are necessarily...

When we moved house it was delayed for several months because the end of the drive had been changed (the original way was dangerous) and although the work had been done, vendors had the paperwork signing off on the change (it has been done before they moved in, their solicitors allowed it while ours didn’t) it hadn’t ever been registered with the land registry.

There are 4 other houses on the driveway; we had to get the deeds of each house changed to reflect the new access and remove the old access. So had to go through 4 extra sets of solicitors and wait for it all to be done - and we ended up having to pay for it all.

Recently we discovered a newish neighbour had to jump through similar hoops in order to move - the changes we had paid for weren’t added to their lease and their solicitor had made them do something slightly different to remedy it in their case despite it being the second time the house had sold after these changes had (allegedly!) been made. Checked with the solicitors that had done the work but as it was longer than 7 years ago they didn’t have the info (which surprised me as I thought they were supposed to keep things like deeds or changes to deeds for ever rather than throw out after 7 years!).

Spoke to one of the older neighbours who remembered us getting the access documents sorted.

Lockdown hit and interrupted my investigations but it’s now back on my to do list - as they managed to change a different boundary at the same time despite it not being shown on the submitted maps, so I need to get that unpicked too... (which is currently driving me crazy as when I asked the land registry how to do this they said my other boundary couldn’t have been changed therefore there’s nothing to undo. ).

So sadly I can understand that even if an additional deed or codicil etc had been made or added to your deeds there’s a chance that they won’t have been updated by the land registry.

Sadly I have no idea how to effectively sort this out (although I’m hoping that I might find out in the next few weeks so will update if I do!).

Has your solicitor sorted this out, OP?