The plan says no easement. You walked it and there is an easement.
Buying land is two streams of information that nobody puts side by side. There is what you saw standing on the plot, and there is what the title, the searches and the particulars say about it. Your solicitor reads one of them. Nobody reads both. The gap between them is where the money goes.
What you found, in the order you found it
A standard list of checks to record against, so you are not relying on remembering to look. Ecology. Highways and access. The local plan. Levels at the entrance. The cabinets and the poles. What you write is yours and it is a sentence, not a tick.
Six findings on one plot, each of which is a cost, a delay or a refusal.
Brick outbuilding at the back has open eaves and droppings on the sill. Agent says it is coming down. If it has bats that is a survey and a season, not a week. That is not a note. That is somebody working out, in June, that their demolition might be stuck until the following spring — and it is written where it will still be found.
Visibility to the right is cut by the hedge on the neighbour’s land, not ours. That hedge is the whole access question.A plot you cannot get a driveway out of is not a plot, and the agent’s particulars will never say so.
The title, the rights and the deeds, read by somebody who has also stood on the plot.
The right of way over the track is worded for agricultural purposes. That is not a right to bring a house in and it is not a right to live there afterwards. Recorded on the seventh of July, flagged to the solicitor, and answerable. Found in October, it is a renegotiation or a loss.
Every visit, and what you went to check
Three visits, each with a reason for going and something taken away from it.
The second visit is the one that matters: back after two days of rain, to see where the water goes. The ditch under the hedge was running. Nothing standing on the plot itself. Nobody remembers to go back in the wet, and nobody who does remembers what they saw eleven months later.
The questions you raised, and where each one stands
Three states and no others: still open, answered, or risk accepted unpriced. That last one is the honest option, and it exists because buyers do accept risks knowingly — the point is that it is recorded as a decision rather than lost as an oversight.
Seven questions on one plot, four of them still open.
These are the questions a solicitor does not ask because they are not legal questions, and a surveyor does not ask because nobody has instructed one yet. Who maintains the ditch. Whether the network operator will move the pole, and what that costs. They are yours to chase, and this is the list you chase them from.
And then the two streams, side by side
What the documents say, beside what you found yourself.
Four disagreements between the paperwork and the ground, two of them already raised with the seller.
No easement against an easement. No footpath is shown against the neighbour says there was one. Each conflict is either still open, raised with the seller, or settled one way or another — and settled means settled, not forgotten. This is the single most useful screen in the product and it costs you nothing but writing down what you already saw.
All of it travels with you. The plot record exports on its own, and the whole lot lands in the pack you leave with under The land and Legal — which matters on the day you sell, because the questions a buyer’s solicitor asks are the ones you asked first.
Choosing between plots in the first place is the part before this one.