WolfBite
We take a longer look below at the tribunal decision in Holder-Vale v Holdaway [2024] in which a land owner applied for a determination of the exact line of the boundary between two paddocks.
The key takeaways are:
- The starting point for resolving any boundary dispute will be the transfer by which the land was first divided.
- If, as is common, the transfer shows only a general boundary, other evidence will be considered such as physical features that existed at the time, also known as “extrinsic” features.
- In this case, the applicant argued that the plan attached to the original transfer showed the red line of the boundary running in a straight line, and sought a determination on that basis.
- Rejecting the application, the tribunal found that a reasonable purchaser standing on the land at the time of the transfer with the “plan in hand” would have assumed that they were buying a paddock up to the line of the fence, and the fence was not straight.
This is particularly important when dealing with rural land where fences, hedges, walls and other physical features might shed crucial light on where the true line of a boundary is.
General boundaries
When land is registered at the Land Registry, its plans are usually based on large scale Ordnance Survey maps. These are subject to limitations and will generally not show the precise position of a boundary between neighbouring properties.
Most Land Registry title plans will therefore only show what is described as “general boundaries”.
The Land Registry will try to show the true position of the boundary as accurately as possible but, despite the red lines on title plans, the exact line of the boundary is left undetermined.
There is a further problem. Due to the scales that Ordnance Survey maps use, the thickness of a line on a Land Registry plan can equate to one metre or more on the ground. Applying red edging can compound scaling problems still further. This can make a significant difference, particularly when dealing with larger areas of rural land.
It is often the case that a transfer deed, by which land is transferred from one owner to the next, will attach a plan that is either based on the Land Registry title plan showing only a general boundary, or that will specifically say that it is “for the purposes of identification only”. This means that the exact position of the boundary is not recorded on the title.
Application to determine a line of the boundary
There is a process under section 60 of the Land Registration Act 2002 and Part 10 of the Land Registration Rules 2003 under which an owner of land can apply to the Land Registry to determine the exact line of the boundary.
If the Land Registry is satisfied that the applicant has shown the boundary with sufficient precision, has an arguable case that the exact boundary line is where they say it is, and that all relevant neighbouring owners have been identified, it will give notice of the application to the adjoining owners.
If any of the adjoining owners object to the application, and the objection is not found to be groundless, the Land Registry will transfer the matter to the Land Registration division of the First-tier Tribunal, unless the parties can reach agreement.
How is a boundary line determined?
The starting point for resolving disputes about the true position of a boundary is the wording of the transfer deed by which the land was first divided and transferred from the original owner to the new owner.
The transfer deed will generally be interpreted by reference to the circumstances existing at the date of the transfer.
The court will consider what a reasonable person, standing in the position of the parties, would have understood the transfer to mean. It will not take account of the subjective intentions of the actual parties.
There are some cases in which the narrative description of the land in the transfer will be very clear, so that there is no need to refer to a plan.
There are, similarly, cases in which the transfer will say that the plan contains the “dominant description” of the land, in which case the plan may be decisive.
However, it is often the case that the narrative description will not precisely define the boundary, and that plans attached to the transfer will only provide a general indication of where the true boundary is.
In these cases, precise boundaries must be established by reference to other evidence.
There are various principles that the tribunal will apply, and inferences that it can draw from physical features existing and known at the date of the transfer (such as the position of fences, walls, hedges, ditches and streams).
Importantly, in one of the leading cases, the House of Lords (now the Supreme Court) held that, where a line has been drawn on an Ordnance Survey map, there is no reason in principle to prefer that map as evidence of the true position of the boundary over any other relevant evidence (such as physical features that existed at the time).
Holder-Vale v Holdaway
Mrs Holder-Vale applied for a determination of the exact line of the boundary between her and her neighbour’s fields.
The applicant and the respondents used their respective fields as paddocks for horses.
The two parcels of land were separated by a pair of wooden fences that broadly (but not precisely) ran parallel to each other, in a jagged fashion, across a field before splaying slightly at one end. In the small gap between the two fences were a number of trees and shrubs.
It was common ground that the Land Registry plans only showed the general boundaries.
It was also common ground that the double-fencing had been in the same location since about the mid-1980s. The fencing could be seen in aerial images on Google Earth (often a useful source of historic information in boundary disputes) from 1999 onwards.
It was also not in issue that the applicant’s father had owned all of the land for about 20 years from the mid-1980s.
The applicant said that she and her parents had planted the trees between the two paddocks mainly as screening for privacy. The double fences had been erected to protect the young trees, and to provide additional separation between the horses that would graze in each of the paddocks.
The legal boundary between the two paddocks was created when the father transferred one of the paddocks to the applicant in January 2006.
The 2006 transfer was therefore of central importance in determining where the exact boundary was.
Neither party sought to argue that the boundary had shifted over time or had changed as a result of adverse possession (which can be a complicating factor in many such cases).
The 2006 transfer
At the time the applicant’s father transferred the paddock to the applicant in 2006, the land was not registered at the Land Registry.
The transfer deed described the land being transferred as land “shown edged red” on an attached plan.
The attached plan was an annotated version of an old 1977-1981 Ordnance Survey map. It did not show any physical features. It did, however, show a solid black straight line running across the field. Someone had used a red felt-tip pen to draw the red edging on one side of that black line to identify the land being transferred.
The scale of the plan was 1:2500, meaning that the distance of 1mm on the plan corresponded to 2.5 metres on the ground.
The transfer of the paddock in 2006 triggered a requirement to register the applicant’s land at the Land Registry.
When it dealt with the registration, the Land Registry generated its own title plan which was based on the current version of the Ordnance Survey map. This later version of the Ordnance Survey seemingly did show physical features, including the double fence. Rather than drawing the red edging as running in a straight line, as shown in the 2006 transfer, the Land Registry drew the red line as running along the fence closest to the applicant’s paddock.
The tribunal’s conclusion
The applicant argued that the plan attached to the 2006 transfer should be used to determine the exact position of the boundary line. The 2006 transfer showed the boundary running in a straight line across the field. The applicant said, in effect, that the line of the fences should be ignored.
The tribunal did not accept this.
The tribunal did not agree that the 2006 transfer plan was so clear that other evidence could and should not be looked at.
The plan attached to the 2006 transfer was 1:2500 and contained no other measurements. The straight black line did not accurately line up with other physical features, was not stated to be the boundary line and the red edging was in any case slightly inside that line.
This was therefore a case that the judge considered was “crying out” to be construed by reference to the physical condition of the land at the date of the 2006 transfer.
The judge considered that a reasonable purchaser, standing on the land with the 2006 transfer plan in hand, would have assumed that they were buying a fenced paddock, and that the boundary shown on the transfer was intended to depict the physical fence that enclosed the paddock (not the other fence, or the line of trees in between).
Conversely, it would have made no sense to that purchaser to assume that they were instead buying land where the boundary sliced through the fencing at certain points, and which included a triangle of land at one end that was wholly fenced within someone else’s paddock.
The tribunal accordingly rejected the application to determine the boundary, which was based on the boundary running in a straight line.
Strictly speaking, given that the tribunal did not determine the exact line of the boundary, the Land Registry plans for both properties still only show the general boundaries.
Although the judge expressed his view about where the boundary line might be, these were not binding, leaving scope for further disputes between the parties which the judge urged them to try to resolve by agreement.
If you have a boundary dispute, particularly if it involves rural land, contact our Agricultural Land team by sending an email to hello@hagenwolf.co.uk or call us on 0330 320 1440.
