Metes and bounds
Metes and bounds is a method of describing land by its perimeter: the bearing and distance of each line from corner to corner, the monuments at those corners and the adjoining owners along the way. Virginia's survey standard requires a narrative description in this form, on request, for a new boundary survey.
Clockwise from a starting corner, one line at a time
A narrative description starts at one corner and goes around the tract, customarily clockwise, reciting each line before it turns to the next: which way the line runs, how far it goes, whether it curves, what marks the corner where it ends and whose land lies on the other side.
Customarily, the metes and bounds must be recited in a clockwise direction around the property.
18VAC10-20-370, Virginia Administrative Code
Virginia's minimum standard for land boundary surveys spells out what that recital has to carry. The description must reflect all of the metes and bounds, which the regulation lists as follows:
- bearings, distances and curve data sufficient to reconstruct the geometry of the tract;
- the area of the property described;
- all pertinent monumentation, meaning the markers found or set at the corners;
- the names of record owners, or other appropriate identification, of all adjoiners.
Read a description in that order and it separates into two kinds of information. One is measurement: the bearings, distances and curves that let anyone redraw the shape on paper. The other is attachment: the monuments and neighbors that tie that shape to a place on the ground and to the land records. The boundary survey plat carries the same measurements at a set precision, every bearing to one second of arc and every distance to a hundredth of a foot.
Written by the surveyor, when the client asks, for a newly run boundary
The duty to write one is narrow and specific. It belongs to the surveyor, it arises on request, and it attaches to a boundary survey just performed.
The professional must prepare a metes and bounds description in narrative form, if requested by the client or the client's agent, for completion of any newly performed land boundary survey.
18VAC10-20-370, Virginia Administrative Code
So the plat is the drawing, and the narrative is the same boundary put into sentences, the form that can be carried into a deed as words. The monuments it names are the ones the survey leaves behind. The field work that produces those calls and monuments is the subject of how a land survey works.
Neighbors' names, old markers and the record behind a family deed
A description written generations ago was written for its own day. The names in it are the neighbors who owned the adjoining land then, and the markers are whatever stood at the corners when the lines were run.
That is why the adjoiners matter as much as the measurements. When a surveyor takes on a land boundary survey, the regulation requires a search of the land records for the descriptions of the land itself and of the adjoining land, so the neighbors' deeds are read along with the family's. The finished plat shows the adjoining owners of record with recording references, which brings the old names forward to the current ones.
One point sometimes comes up when a family carves out a lot: where a subdivision ordinance applies, Va. Code 15.2-2254 says describing a lot "by metes and bounds in the instrument of transfer" does not exempt a sale of subdivision land from the statute's penalties or remedies. When that rule applies to a split, and when it does not, is covered in whether you can sell just part of your land.
An old family deed full of metes and bounds calls?
Send the deed book and page, or a copy of the deed, and Lowell will read how its description bears on a sale and sort out which questions are a surveyor's to answer. No cost, no obligation.
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Questions about this term
Does a metes and bounds description have to state the acreage?
A narrative description prepared under Virginia's boundary survey standard, 18VAC10-20-370, must reflect the area of the property described, along with the bearings, distances and curve data, the monuments and the adjoiners. That requirement governs descriptions written for a newly performed land boundary survey; what an older deed recites is whatever its drafter put in it.
Why does an old description name neighbors who no longer own the land next door?
A description records the adjoiners as they stood when it was drafted, and later sales of the neighboring land happen in other deeds. A surveyor running a new boundary survey searches the land records for the adjoining land's descriptions too, and the new plat shows the current adjoining owners of record with their recording references.
Where this page's facts come from
Every rule, office and figure above traces to one of these. Rules change; check the office before you act on one.