Updated 18 July 2026
Short Answer – How rights of way (easements) get you into trouble. Trespass is going onto land you don’t own without permission. Nuisance is using the land to annoy your neighbour (including misusing an easement). Unity of ownership cancels easements – so the easement you thought you had does not actually exist.
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What’s the difference between trespass and nuisance ?
The first two are easy to answer, which might look like this…
- Trespass is a claim against a person entering onto your land without permission. If you want to get them off your land, you bring a claim against them in trespass. If they refuse to leave you can get an injunction.
- Nuisance is a claim against a landowner who blocks your right to use their land. You may have a right to use a footpath even though you don’t own the land itself. You would be called the ‘dominant’ user and the land owner would be ‘servient’ to your right of way.
What is unity of ownership?
The thing to note about the nuisance and trespass is that they are claims by adjacent land owners, leaving out public footpaths for the time being. The abstract idea that underpins these claims is that you either own the land, or you use the land. You don’t ‘use’ land that you ‘own’ or – arguably – if you do use land that you own, it is only a ‘quasi’ use. This quasi use or easement become a proper legal right when you split the land.
That is the rule in Wheeldon v Burrows. But what if you buy your neighbours house and then sell it again for a quick profit? The house was run down and you go in, upgrade the windows, boiler, roof, bathroom, kitchen etc and sell it asap. On the face of it there are no issues. All of the rights to use each others land may be noted already perfectly in the HM Land Registry title. So what is the issue?
To understand the pitfall you have to read back above. The concept is that you cannot have rights to use land that you own. If you buy your neighbours house and sell it again, or even move into it and sell your own house, you have no rights to use either plots of land. Even if they are noted in the Land Registry title you will not be able to claim on them. This is known as the principal of ‘unity of ownership’. All of the rights to use land are terminated because the land has been in common ownership of one owner.
This is a problem for many developers and even commercial land owners over the years. In one case I acted on, a hotel owner bought the house next the hotel as a house for the staff to use. The hotel owner sold the hotel but kept the house. It was necessary to regrant all the rights the hotel had to use the access way belonging to the house AND to regrant all the rights the house had to use a soak away on the hotels land, even though those rights had already been expressly granted.
I really struggled to explain this to the other solicitor at the time, but had it not been done the land owners would have had major issues going forward. In any event it all ended well and the hotel owners bought the house a year later. So there you go. Unity of ownership in a nutshell.
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