Land Lost After Boulder Couple Failed To Use It

Best way to avoid this sort of problem is to make sure upon acquiring a piece of land that you go to each and every neighbor (of adjoining or nearby properties) and tell them they have your permission to cross your land without hindrance "until you rescind that permission".

That way any "possession" or "use" of your property by those folks never becomes an "adverse possession".

Get it in writing too ~ file it with your deed down at the courthouse.

Alternatively you can put in a barrier, but folks have done so and lost in court. Giving permission and proving it has never lost ~

A variation is to get them agree to pay rent for crossing your land.

It sounds as if this particular claim was bogus, but the principle behind it is, unfortunately, law.

You can establish a right of way by using a path for a certain number of years. Our children used a path across several neighboring properties, down to a dock on the water from our summer house, and the previous owners also had used it. It didn’t give us any rights to their property, but it did prevent them from fencing us off the path. All but one neighbor were agreeable to letting our kids use it anyway, the one problem being someone who bought a house long after we’d been crossing her property, maybe for thirty years. But she backed off without our having to take it to court.

Another neighbor built a septic field for a converted boat house, that extended into the woods at the bottom of our property. We never noticed it until we came to sell the house, when it suddenly became a problem, because the Title Company wouldn’t issue a guarantee until the matter was settled. The buyer and our neighbor worked out a settlement. But the basic law suggested that he “owned” the property he had mistakenly used, because we hadn’t objected to it. Or, since we hadn’t known about it, at least we would have had to take it to court if they hadn’t agreed to settle the matter to the Title Company’s satisfaction, which would have killed the sale.

This goes against every instinct of fairness, but it’s the law in Maine, where this took place, and probably in other states. I would guess it derives from English common law. I know that in England property owners cannot block public footpaths across their property.

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