A right burdening a title is not folklore, it is an entry at the Land Registry with a date and a deed behind it. Ours grants a named family access to a room on the first floor, in perpetuity, and it has never been removed.
We bought this house in 2018 and I read the title, which people do not, and which our solicitor was slightly surprised by.
A registered title has three parts. The property register, which says what the property is. The proprietorship register, which says who owns it. And the charges register, which lists everything that burdens it: mortgages, covenants, and rights other people have over your land.
Rights of way are the usual thing. A neighbour crossing your drive, a water company's pipe, a right to maintain a wall.
Ours has one I have never seen before or since, and I have now looked at a lot of titles.
Entry 4 on the charges register is a right of access, granted by a conveyance dated 1911, in favour of a named family and their heirs and successors, over and to a room described in the conveyance.
The description is in the deed rather than the register, so I ordered the deed, which is a scanned document you can get for a few pounds.
It is a page and a half of copperplate and the operative part reserves to the grantor and his heirs the right at all reasonable times to enter upon the said dwellinghouse and to have access to the north chamber upon the first floor, and to remain therein.
There is no north chamber on our first floor.
The first floor has four bedrooms and a bathroom and a landing. Two of the bedrooms are on the north side and they are bedrooms: fireplaces, sash windows, plastered walls, floorboards, exactly what a first floor bedroom in an 1890s house is.
Neither of them is a chamber and neither of them is described in the deed's terms, which name the north chamber as if it were a specific and known thing.
I did the sensible things.
Our solicitor's answer, which I got in writing before we exchanged, is that the right is unenforceable in practice because the room is not identifiable, that no claim has ever been made, and that we should take out indemnity insurance, which cost sixty eight pounds as a one off.
That is standard practice and it is correct advice. Half the old titles in this country have something on them that nobody can enforce.
I then did the thing solicitors do not do, which is look up the family.
They are still there.
Not in this house. In the town, four streets away, in a house they have been in since 1924, and the name is on the electoral roll and there are three of them.
That is not sinister. It is a small town and old families stay in it.
What is worth writing down is that the right is in favour of that family and their successors, and rights like this normally die because the family that held them moves away and forgets, and this one has not had the chance.
The insurance.
I read the policy, which people also do not.
Indemnity insurance for a defective title covers you against loss if somebody enforces the right. It does not stop them enforcing it, and it specifically does not cover you if you draw attention to the defect, which is why the policy tells you in bold not to contact the beneficiary.
So the position is: a family four streets away has a registered right to enter my house and be in a room on the first floor, I may not ask them about it, and if they turn up I have a claim against an insurer for whatever it costs me.
The 1911 conveyance.
It is the sale of the house by the man who built it. He kept the right for himself and his heirs, which means he built the house, sold it, and reserved for his family, in perpetuity, access to one room in it.
People reserved odd things in 1911. A right to draw water, to hang washing, to cross a yard.
I have read a fair number of Edwardian conveyances since 2018, in the archive, for no professional reason at all.
I have not found another one that reserves a room.
The floor plan.
The house was measured for the sale, so I have a floor plan with dimensions, and I have measured it myself.
The two north bedrooms and the landing account for the north side of the first floor. The wall between them is a stud wall, which is not original: it is plasterboard on softwood and the boards behind the skirting are cut, and the ceiling rose in the larger bedroom is off centre by about a metre.
An off centre rose in a big room usually means the room was bigger once and was divided.
If you undivided them you would have one large room on the north side of the first floor, about six metres by four.
Which would be a chamber.
What we do about it.
Nothing, and for once nothing is what everybody involved has advised.
The insurance is renewed automatically. The right stays on the register because removing it requires an application and evidence and, in practice, contacting the beneficiary.
We use the larger north bedroom as a spare room. It is a nice room and it gets the morning light.
The one thing I have done that is mine is that I have not taken the stud wall down, and we were quoted for it in 2019 as part of the works and it was cheap and it would give us the best room in the house.
I told the builder we had run out of money that year, which was true, and I have not mentioned it again, and neither has my wife, and I do not know whether that is because she agrees with me or because she has never thought about it at all.