Rabbits Beware: Residents Gain Rights to Drive Over Common Land

Extract

Once the inspiration for the novel Watership Down, Newtown Common in Hampshire has become the breeding ground for litigation. In Bakewell Management Ltd. v. Brandwood [2004] UKHL 14, [2004] 2 A.C. 519, the House of Lords attempted to clarify the relationship between prescriptive acquisition of easements and illegality.

Several homes bordered the common. For decades, owners reached their properties by driving on tracks across the common. No-one questioned this state of affairs until Bakewell Management (BM), having acquired the freehold of the common, wrote to the homeowners explaining that they had no right to drive over the common, but offering “an amnesty” whereby the residents could buy an easement to access their dwellings “at a favourable rate”: 6% of the value of their property (£30,000 in some cases). Many residents refused, insisting that their properties already enjoyed prescriptive easements over the common.