What is Metes and Bounds all about?

You may find that most people do not know what a metes and bounds really are?  Ask a land surveyor or land law attorney what the bounds part of metes and bounds boundary description means.  You may need to know why it may be important and if  the bounds  is left out of your so called “legal” description or survey description of your property.

The bound part of a description is the description of each witness marker for the corners or points along a boundary that change direction or mark the point at the start or end of a curve.  The physical markers are evidence like the markers used in the land run to “stake out” the boundaries of land claims.  Base on freedoms provided in historical records, anyone should be able to file such evidence of record at their public land office.   However, that freedom has been threatened by regulations in some states & countries.  That evidence can be documented and should be filed of record and tied to the land that it applies for use in the settlement of disputes and for historical records to protect your claim or ownership/use of your land.

You can use the services of an experienced local land surveyor to get the needed help in locating and documenting such evidence on and into the ground.  It seems that the mention of that evidence is lacking these days and much has changed since 1965 when I first started land surveying.

In the apprentice system of leaning, it was better known, practiced, and perpetuated. Back in the early 1990′s I started working on a concept to create a network of Land Surveyors of all levels to cooperate, share ideas, and provide eduction, training, and resources.  Great progress toward that is being made since 2009 with the Land Surveyor’s United (LSU) support network and recently with the Land Surveyors University (LSU) online and world wide.

Nowadays, you cannot find the funding set aside for County Surveyors or programs to perpetuate the base grid that make up the survey system with original monuments.   I hope to see this change for the better in the future as we promote the importance and awareness of this and correct it.

In a tough economy more people are doing without and just want to know where to look for their property corners and need a better map to help them find or plan for the staking of their corners.  They want an agreement with their neighbor so that they can determine where their boundary is for agreement for their improvements and for the use by future owners.   The existing marker are considered the most important evidence.   The second priority evidence is the distance and angle relationship of those “corners” so that missing corners can be reset or found if lost or destroyed.  Distance relationships to nearby structures can serve well to find or restore missing points using triangulation and other methods.

When they can afford it, land owners should order a full survey and description will have calls of the actual monuments that are found or set.  Monuments with their true State Plane Coordinates are the most important front-line evidence in a court of law in land disputes. The metes or “dimensions” consisting of distances and bearings (relative angles to each line from monument to monument) are not as important, however they are extremely important in order to find the most important form of evidence, the monumentation or bounds part of the description best shown in a drawing as evidence.