Easements, explainedHow a right to use someone else's land is created, read, moved and enforced

Start with the two estates the law names, because the rest of this guide uses their names. Virginia's easement relocation statute, Va. Code 55.1-304, names them. The dominant estate is the estate or interest in real property "benefitted by an appurtenant easement." The servient estate is the one "that is burdened by an easement."

The Supreme Court of Virginia has described an easement as the privilege to use the land of another in a particular manner and for a particular purpose, and has said it is not an ownership interest in the servient tract. So the owner of the ground under a shared gravel lane still owns that strip. The neighbor with the easement owns a right to use it, for the purpose the easement serves, and nothing more.

Easements are appurtenant to the dominant tract, and run with it, when they benefit the owner in using and enjoying that tract. The relocation statute separates who holds each kind. For an appurtenant easement the holder is the dominant estate owner. For an easement in gross, the holder is the grantee of the easement or a successor.

Some easements exist to carry lines rather than people. Virginia's utility easement statute defines utility services as products, services and equipment related to energy, broadband and other communications, water and sewerage, and those easements run under rules of their own, set out in what a utility easement is and what it allows.

A written easement lives in the land records, and a deed can pass the benefit of one along without describing it.

Because an appurtenant easement runs with the dominant tract, Virginia reads the deed to that tract to include it unless the deed makes an exception, and recording is what the Code ties to later buyers. What that means for a parcel whose way in turns up nothing in the land records is worked through in what to do when land has no recorded easement.

In Carroll County those records sit with the Circuit Court Clerk's Office, 605-1 Pine Street, A230, Hillsville. The office says anyone can search the county's Land Record Index back to 1842 without paying a monthly fee, that images cannot be viewed with that service, and that land record questions go to the Clerk's Office at 276-730-3070.

Division brings easements onto the plat. Carroll County's posted subdivision ordinance, dated April 14, 2014, requires a preliminary plat to show the names and addresses of the holders of any easements affecting the property. It also says the chapter does not annul any easement, covenant or other private agreement, while its own rules govern where they are more restrictive. Whether the current ordinance still reads that way is a question for Carroll County Land Use and Planning, 276-730-3008.

In April 2026, in Thibault Enterprises, LLC v. Yost, the Supreme Court of Virginia set out the order in which courts take up a claim that something intrudes on an easement.

The deed's purpose comes first, and whether the landowner's conduct unreasonably interferes comes second. That test, the older cases the Court looked back on, and where a particular obstruction crosses the line are the subject of whether a neighbor can block your easement.

The remedies are framed by statute and by equity. A violation of Va. Code 55.1-305 may be deemed a private nuisance, without cutting off any other relief, and anyone asking a court to stop an encroachment within an easement has to prove both the easement and the need for that relief. Running the other way, a servient owner may bring a civil action over a violation of the rules of use set under Va. Code 55.1-305.1.

Some ways across private land become public highways through work and use rather than a deed, and Va. Code 33.2-105 sets the proof.

when a way has been regularly or periodically worked by highway officials as a public highway and used by the public as such continuously for a period of 20 years, proof of these facts shall be conclusive evidence that the same is a public highway.

Va. Code 33.2-105

Proof that highway officials worked a way as a public highway and that the public used it as one is prima facie evidence that it is public. In all such cases the width is presumed to be 30 feet in the absence of proof to the contrary. The section does not turn a way into a public highway where the public's use has been permissive and the highway officials' work was done under the owner's permission.

The vocabulary matters when the plans come out. VDOT's survey guidance treats fee simple right of way and easements as different things: prescriptive or statutory right of way easements are shown on its plans but are not labeled as existing fee right of way. Virginia's statutes, for their part, use the phrase easement of right-of-way for a private way across another's land.

A road can also be public in name and private in practice. Where a public road that was never abandoned is no longer publicly maintained and serves as the primary access for more than one owner, any one of them may maintain, repair or improve it at his own expense after administrative review by the local government and mailed notice to the others, without interfering with their use. Upkeep of ways that were always private is a separate matter, covered in private roads and maintenance agreements.