Property/Land maps

Thoie

It seems there's often questions about where land boundaries are, and who owns what bit of land.

A number of years back I was going through a bunch of old deeds/leases (some from the 1700s onwards) that were describing plots of land, and it was all very complicated, particularly where one piece of land was split into smaller sections, but then someone later inherited/leased 2 or more adjoining plots, then passed that "bigger" plot on to someone else.

So I appreciate that historically mapping and descriptions couldn't be quite as accurate, and many of today's "issues" stem from these older parts.

However, for more modern sales (for example, a standard housing estate), why aren't accurate GPS coordinates used for the mapping?

I bought a semi-d a few years back, and it seems that the map was still quite vague. There's a piece of grass between me and the neighbours and neither of us are quite sure if we're supposed to mind it half and half, or if it belongs to one of us or the other. It's not causing any issues, it's just something we'd been chatting about.

For your bog standard rectangular plot in a housing estate, why are coordinates not provided such as "the plot is the area bounded by 50.12345N, 9.432W;
50.12345N, 9.418160W; 50.126105N, 9.418160W and 50.126222N,9.432W?

Victor

The Earth is not a perfect sphere.

Addle

We had to pay an engineer to mark a boundary on a map with coordinates in it, so I think it is a requirement?

Peregrinus

Thoie wrote: »

It seems there's often questions about where land boundaries are, and who owns what bit of land.

A number of years back I was going through a bunch of old deeds/leases (some from the 1700s onwards) that were describing plots of land, and it was all very complicated, particularly where one piece of land was split into smaller sections, but then someone later inherited/leased 2 or more adjoining plots, then passed that "bigger" plot on to someone else.

So I appreciate that historically mapping and descriptions couldn't be quite as accurate, and many of today's "issues" stem from these older parts.

However, for more modern sales (for example, a standard housing estate), why aren't accurate GPS coordinates used for the mapping?

I bought a semi-d a few years back, and it seems that the map was still quite vague. There's a piece of grass between me and the neighbours and neither of us are quite sure if we're supposed to mind it half and half, or if it belongs to one of us or the other. It's not causing any issues, it's just something we'd been chatting about.

For your bog standard rectangular plot in a housing estate, why are coordinates not provided such as "the plot is the area bounded by 50.12345N, 9.432W;
50.12345N, 9.418160W; 50.126105N, 9.418160W and 50.126222N,9.432W?

If your plot is not a perfect quadrilateral, this can get very complicated very quicky. It doesn't deal well with plots all or part of whose boundaries are defined by natural features (e.g. watercourses) or by man-made, but not necessarily straight-line, features (e.g hedges, ditches) or by older territorial divisions (e.g. townland or parish boundaries).

And for the ordinary user it's not "transparent"; given a bunch of co-ordinates you have to pay somebody to plot them on a map for you before you have any idea where your plot is or what it looks like. I have a suspicion that this system might lead to more people buying/selling plots that turn out to be not quite what they thought, rather than fewer.

coylemj

Thoie wrote: »

For your bog standard rectangular plot in a housing estate, why are coordinates not provided such as "the plot is the area bounded by 50.12345N, 9.432W;
50.12345N, 9.418160W; 50.126105N, 9.418160W and 50.126222N,9.432W?

A set of longitude/latitude values doesn't fix the location of a plot, it depends on which geodetic datum was used.

Ordnance Survey Ireland and GB have good reading material on the subject ......

https://www.osi.ie/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/The-Irish-Grid-A-Description-of-the-Coordinate-Reference-System-Used-in-Ireland.pdf

https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/documents/resources/guide-coordinate-systems-great-britain.pdf