The instrument
An easement is four paragraphs of restriction and a great deal of ordinary life carrying on.
- 01Can the public walk on it?
Only if you write that in. Most of our easements grant no public access at all, and the land stays as private as it was the day before you signed. If you do want a trail across it, that is a separate paragraph you choose to add — it is never a condition of the easement.
Your land stays yours to post, gate, or leave open.
- 02Can you still farm and log?
Yes. Farming continues without our involvement. Timber harvest continues under a forest management plan, and above a threshold written into your easement you give us notice first — notice, not permission. Nobody at Cedar Line has ever told a landowner they may not cut firewood.
Working land keeps working.
- 03Can you build?
Farm and forestry structures, yes. Houses are the part an easement actually restricts: most of ours reserve a small building envelope you choose at signing and extinguish the development rights on the rest. That reserved envelope is the negotiation, and it happens before anything is signed.
You pick the envelope. We record what is left.
- 04Can you sell it?
Yes, at any time, to anyone, without asking us. The easement travels with the deed, so the next owner takes the land with the same terms. We ask sellers to tell us so we can walk the new owner through what they are buying, but that is a courtesy and not a requirement.
Sell freely. The restriction goes with the land, not with you.
Four times we will tell you not to do this.
An easement is permanent, which means a bad fit is permanent too. These are the four conversations that most often end with us recommending against the thing we exist to do.
- You mainly want a tax result
- Talk to your own accountant before you talk to us. An easement has tax consequences and they depend entirely on your situation. We will not quote you a number, and anyone in this field who does should worry you.
- You may want to subdivide later
- Then do not sign one. An easement is permanent, and "we thought we could split off a lot for our daughter" is the single most common regret we hear about other trusts' easements.
- The land is already protected
- Some parcels carry restrictions from an earlier programme that do most of what we would do. We will read what you already have before proposing anything on top of it.
- You want us to take the land
- We rarely buy land, and when we do it is to resell it with restrictions to a farmer who will work it. If what you need is a buyer, we are not one, and we will say so at the first meeting rather than the fourth.
If none of those four describes you, the next step is a walk on the land with no document in anyone’s hand.
Arrange the walk