Appurtenant easements run with the land
An appurtenant easement benefits one parcel, the dominant estate, and burdens another, the servient estate. If Parcel A has a driveway right across Parcel B, A is dominant and B servient.
The trap: labelling the parcel that physically carries the roadway as dominant. The burdened parcel is the servient one. Because an appurtenant easement runs with the land, selling Parcel A does not end the right; it passes to the new owner. An easement in gross is different: it benefits a person or entity rather than a parcel, and the number of users never makes one.
When a license hardens into an easement
A parol (oral) license is revocable at any time if revocation does no harm to the licensee. Once the licensee has acted on it and incurred expense, it is no longer revocable and becomes an easement running with the land. A neighbor who spent $18,000 laying pipe on oral permission holds an irrevocable easement.
Calling it void for lack of a writing overstates the requirement: the statute expressly contemplates oral licenses. The neighbor gets no fee title — an easement is a use right, not ownership of the soil.
Encroachments are found on the ground
An encroachment is a physical intrusion of a structure across a boundary, found by survey or physical inspection.
The trap: a title search. Recorded easements and liens appear in the land records, but an unrecorded physical intrusion does not. A tax bill shows assessed value, not boundaries; an appraisal estimates value even though the appraiser visits.
Private ways by prescription
Georgia rule: a private way may arise by prescription after seven years of uninterrupted use through improved lands, or 20 years through wild lands. Once a private way has been in constant uninterrupted use for seven or more years with no legal steps taken to abolish it, no one may interfere with it, so nine years of daily driving across improved pasture creates the right. Compulsory purchase through the superior court is an alternative route, not a prerequisite to the prescriptive right.