Visualize Legal Descriptions With a Metes and Bounds Plotter
Trees are cut down, fences are moved, dirt roads grow over with disuse – our landscape is always changing. Unfortunately, it’s not always that simple. This exercise continues until you find yourself back at the beginning with a closed shape. From there, you simply follow the specified course for the appropriate distance until you should find your next monument or landmark. So, what do you do with these metes and bounds descriptions nowadays? In a perfect world, the original survey would give you a point of beginning, something that still exists and hasn’t been moved. The legal description on a deed could have been relatively casual and still have met the standards of early land laws. For instance, when land was inherited within a family, everybody would have already been familiar with the property boundaries. That is a product of their initial audience’s understanding and interpretation. You may find that some survey descriptions are fairly substantial while others are so vague that if three different surveyors mapped the boundaries of the same property, they’d all end up slightly different. At each angle, also called corners, the surveyor will reference a monument. There are regional units of measurement you could stumble on from time to time, though. You’ll also be told the distance of each course, usually measured in a well known unit such as feet or chains. This will either be with respect to a meridian or magnetic north. In a legal survey description, the land boundaries are run out by courses (the direction of the line). The system can be particularly helpful for writing the legal descriptions of irregularly shaped land, something more complicated than a rectangle. That’s what a metes and bounds plotter system determines: the perimeter of a property. They can be identified by natural features such as rivers or by man made marcations such as stakes. Metes and bounds are the boundaries or limits for a parcel of land. Oftentimes, the land in question would be new territory, and the legal descriptions would provide useful information such as predicted land uses, natural features and the people surrounding a property. These descriptions were written to be best interpreted by a community, and so they offer customized, rich characterizations. It also led to new land laws and the eventual establishment of recording institutions in our country.Īnother advantage of metes and bounds survey descriptions is the information about the land. Metes and bounds gave people a way to designate, own, buy and sell property. Whenever America was still being settled by immigrants to the continent, there was no standard for measuring and recording land plots. The metes and bounds system allowed for more customized property practices that utilized localized knowledge and facilitated community development.
#Free metes and bounds plotter how to#
The challenge now is figuring out how to translate the information from then to the parcel mapping needs of now. There are more modern, standardized systems for land boundaries today, but the metes and bounds plotter system continues to hang on in the form of old land surveys, deeds and other documents. What was a dependable reference point in one era may not be helpful to someone today. The problem, of course, is that trees can die, streams can dry up, roads can be moved and man made structures can fall down. They used points such as trees, boulders, streams, roads, buildings and anything else that may have been near them as a reference for property boundaries. This system, which utilizes the completely subjective interpretation of natural features and markers by a land surveyor, is by no means new, but it’s also not going away anytime soon, either.īack in the day, when surveyors lacked sophisticated measuring systems and mapping tools, metes and bounds was a reliable option. In the United States, the fingerprints for this method of surveying property can be most easily found in the states that were once the 13 original colonies.
The metes and bounds system is nearly as old as land ownership itself, with evidence of it existing from as far back as Ptolemaic Egypt and the Roman Republic.
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