A worn path to the water almost became someone else's legal right

The situation

Bogdan noticed the trail the same week he was walking the property with a contractor, pricing out a new dock. A narrow track ran from the side yard, through a stand of cedars, down to the shoreline. The grass along it was pressed flat in a way that only happens from years of feet, not months. He asked his tenant, Khalil, who had been renting the house for three seasons, whether he knew who used it. Khalil said people had been crossing the yard 'as long as I've lived here' and that he had always assumed it was fine.

Bogdan had bought the property as an investment roughly six years earlier, paying well into seven figures for the lake frontage and the rental income it could generate, and he treated the rental as one line in a larger portfolio, not something he checked on often. Logistics had been his business for most of his working life, and the rental was meant to be the low-maintenance half of his investing. He had never walked the back of the lot in winter, never noticed the path from the road, and had no idea how long it had actually been there or who had been using it.

A conversation with his neighbour, Layla, changed the tone of the whole question. Layla worked as an investment advisor and was used to thinking in terms of what a position was actually worth, and she raised the path almost the same way she might raise an asset she assumed was already accounted for. Her family had been using that path to reach the lake since before Bogdan owned the property — decades, she said, going back to her parents. She was not hostile about it. She simply assumed it was understood between the two properties, the way an old habit becomes a fact nobody questions.

What worried Bogdan was not the path itself. It was the word 'decades.' In Ontario, a use that is open, continuous, and uninterrupted for a long enough period can, in narrow circumstances tied to how the land was originally registered, ripen into a right the current owner cannot simply cancel — a prescriptive easement, in the language the doctrine actually goes by. If Layla's use had truly run without a break for that length of time, Bogdan might not be free to fence the path off or charge for its use — it could belong to her property permanently, regardless of what his deed said, and regardless of the fact that no such right had ever been registered against the title he had checked before buying.

The complication

The claim, if it held up, was not a minor inconvenience. A right of way that attaches to a neighbouring property runs with the land — it would not end when Layla sold her house, and it would bind Bogdan's tenants, his future buyers, and anyone who owned the rental after him. It could also affect the property's value, since a right of way of unclear scope tends to make buyers and appraisers cautious.

The legal test for a prescriptive easement in Ontario does not turn on how long ago the use started. Under the Real Property Limitations Act and the related common-law doctrine of lost modern grant, a claimant has to show twenty years of open, continuous use, without permission ever being asked or granted, and without the true owner objecting or blocking it. Not every blockage within that twenty-year run defeats the claim, though — a fence up for a season, or a gate that was locked and then objected to or removed, does not by itself break the run. What matters is whether the claimant put up with the obstruction for a year or more after becoming aware of it; an interruption tolerated that long is what actually resets the clock.

That created an unusual problem: nobody involved actually knew whether the use had been continuous. Layla was confident it had. Khalil had only lived there three years and could not speak to anything before that. Bogdan had never lived on the property and had no personal memory of what the back yard looked like a decade earlier. The dispute was not really about whether people had walked that path — everyone agreed they had — it was about whether anything had ever interrupted them, and that was a question about the past that none of the people in the room could answer from memory.

Making it more difficult, Ontario's Land Titles Act blocks any new prescriptive claim from arising once a property is registered under the land titles system — a use that only became continuous after conversion can never ripen into a right, no matter how long it carries on afterward. A claim can still survive if it had already fully matured before that date: a complete, unbroken twenty-year run finished while the land was still under the older registry system counts as an existing interest the conversion does not erase. Bogdan's property had been converted into land titles years before he bought it, which meant the real question was narrower and older than anyone in the room had first assumed — had Layla's family already completed twenty unbroken years of use before that date, and had anything happened during that specific window to break the chain. An interruption discovered only in recent years would matter solely if it could be tied back to that earlier, legally decisive window rather than to the present day.

What we did

1. Mapped the legal question precisely before looking for any evidence at all, so the investigation had a clear target: had Layla's family already completed a full twenty unbroken years of open, unpermitted use of the path before the land titles conversion date, and had anything interrupted them specifically within that earlier window. This kept the search focused on the period that actually mattered legally, instead of collecting anything from any era that seemed generally relevant to the dispute.
2. Reviewed the property's registered history, including the exact conversion date and any notations or reservations already on title, to confirm no right of way had ever been formally registered against either lot and to fix the precise date dividing the legally decisive period from everything that happened afterward, including Bogdan's own six years of ownership, so the investigation would not waste time on evidence from the wrong era.
3. Interviewed Bogdan, Khalil, and Layla separately to build a timeline of what each of them actually knew firsthand, rather than what they assumed or had been told by relatives. This surfaced the useful detail that Layla's own reliable memory only went back to her childhood, roughly twenty-five years, not the 'decades and decades' she had first suggested when the conversation with Bogdan began.
4. Searched for physical evidence bearing on the fence's age, since only an interruption inside the pre-conversion window would matter. Old real estate listing photos from Bogdan's own purchase file, taken by the listing agent six years earlier, showed the exact stretch of yard — and the ordinary, easily overlooked detail that mattered was a wire fence visible in the background, still standing across the path at the time he bought the property.
5. Traced the fence's origin through nearby municipal records, including a building permit filed by a previous owner more than fifteen years before Bogdan's purchase, for yard work that specifically referenced fencing installed along that boundary — a filing date that placed the fence's origin before the land was ever converted into the land titles system, rather than merely sometime in the recent past.
6. Assessed whether the interruption was legally sufficient, confirming that a fence installed before conversion had been left standing, undisturbed, for years afterward — well past the year-or-more threshold that turns a blockage into a genuine break — right up to the time of Bogdan's purchase six years ago, meaning Layla's family could never have accumulated a complete twenty unbroken years before the conversion date, whatever use had occurred earlier or continued informally afterward.
7. Prepared a written response to Layla setting out the evidence plainly, including copies of the photographs and the permit record with its filing date, rather than moving straight to a formal dispute, so she could see the basis for the position — and the actual timeline it rested on — without an adversarial opening that would only harden positions on both sides.
8. Advised Bogdan on protecting the property going forward, including documenting the current state of the yard with dated photographs of his own and, if he chose to permit continued informal use, doing so in writing on terms that made clear it was permission, not a right — the step that prevents this exact question from recurring with a different neighbour in another twenty years.

The outcome

The permit record and the photographs together settled the dispute. Once Layla saw a fence dated to before the land titles conversion, still standing when Bogdan bought the property six years later, she accepted that her account of unbroken family use did not match what the record showed — the twenty years she needed had never had the chance to run without a break. She did not pursue a formal claim, and no right of way was registered or recognized against the property. Bogdan kept full, unencumbered control of a lot worth well into seven figures, including the option to fence the path, remove it, or manage access to the lake shore however he chose.

The resolution did not require litigation. A dispute like this, if it had gone further, could have taken well over a year to resolve through the courts and would have cost far more than the investigation itself, with no guarantee the outcome would favour either side once the facts were tested formally. Finding the interruption early avoided that entirely, and it meant Bogdan never had to bring in a surveyor or an expert on the fence line's history, either of which would have added real cost on top of the delay.

Bogdan did agree, informally, to let Layla continue using a version of the path — but on paper this time, as a revocable permission rather than a right, with the arrangement documented so it could not quietly turn into the same claim again decades from now. Layla was satisfied with that outcome too; she had never wanted a fight, only continued access, and getting it in writing gave her more certainty than the unspoken understanding ever had.

For Khalil, as the tenant living day to day beside the dispute, the outcome mattered in a smaller but practical way: he no longer had to field questions from Layla's relatives about who was allowed to cross the yard, and the boundary of what he was responsible for maintaining as tenant became clear rather than assumed. Bogdan, for his part, added a short note to his own file confirming the interruption evidence, so that if the question ever surfaced again with a different neighbour or a future buyer, the answer would already be documented rather than needing to be reconstructed from scratch a second time.

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