Site selection

Every parcel I look at is put through the same four questions, in the same order, and the order matters because each one can end the exercise before the next is worth asking. They are not a scoring system and nothing is weighted: they are gates.

I start standing in the road, not in the gate. From there I can see how far a driver would be able to look each way, what the hedge or wall along the frontage is built of, whether the carriageway has a kerb or a soft verge, and whether anything already parks where an entrance would go.

Inside the gate the first thing I look for is water: where the ground falls, where it is soft in the middle of a dry week, where a ditch runs and where it goes. A field that holds water in August will hold a great deal more in February, and the attenuation that answers it comes straight out of the developable area.

Last comes the boundary itself, walked with a tape and a copy of the title plan. Hedges get rebuilt slightly off line, fences get replaced a foot into the wrong field, and a discrepancy found on the walk is a negotiation, while the same discrepancy found by a solicitor is a delay.

Next: why the acreage in the advert misleads

An advert quotes gross area, because gross area is what the title says. What a layout can use is what is left after the shared surfaces are taken out, and on a small parcel the shared surfaces are proportionally enormous: a drive that serves four plots takes very nearly as much ground as a drive that serves twelve.

The widget on the first sheet does this arithmetic out loud, and the reason it rounds down rather than up is that the last plot in any calculation is the one that has to be argued for hardest. A layout carrying eleven plots comfortably is a better scheme than one carrying twelve with every garden at the minimum, and it is also the one that gets determined faster.

Next: what puts a site down on the first visit

• Visibility that can only be achieved across ground somebody else owns, with no agreement in place and no sign that one is obtainable.
• A foul drainage answer that depends on crossing a third party’s land, where the route has never been formalised and no easement appears on the title.
• An access that would need the whole frontage hedge taken down rather than opened, leaving nothing to turn the ends into.
• Ground that falls so steeply from the road that the levels alone would set the shape of every plot and the cost of every foundation.
• A title with a restrictive covenant against building, or a right of way across the only buildable part of the field.
• A neighbouring use that the scheme would have to design around entirely, rather than simply respond to.

Where I put a site down I say why, in one sentence, to whoever brought it to me. A landowner who hears which test the land failed can go and deal with it, and more than one parcel has come back a year later with an easement in place and a different answer.

Next: reading a title plan against a tape

The title plan is the first document I ask for and the one I trust least on its own. It is drawn over an ordnance survey base at a scale where the thickness of the red line covers a genuine width of ground, and the features it follows were surveyed when they stood where they then stood.

So I take a tape to the things the plan claims. Where the red line follows a hedge, I check which face of the hedge it follows and whether the hedge has been rebuilt. Where it follows a fence, I check whether the fence is the original one. Where it crosses open ground, I look for the stake, the change of surface or the old gatepost that the surveyor used, because something was there once.

Two other entries matter more than the plan does. The register lists the rights that benefit the land, which is where an access easement or a drainage right would appear if one exists, and the charges and restrictions, which is where a covenant against building would sit. A site that fails on either of those fails quietly, without anything visible on the ground at all.

Next: the ground I look in

The area is the south-east corner of the county — the Looe and Liskeard hinterland, the Seaton valley, and the villages between them. That boundary is set by how often I need to be standing on a site rather than by where the land is cheapest, and a parcel two hours away would get fewer visits than it needs from a business run this way.

Within that ground the parcels that interest me are the awkward ones: an infill plot between two houses, a paddock with an existing frontage, the yard behind a terrace that has stopped earning its keep. They are awkward because the four tests above are genuinely hard to pass there, and that is also why they are still available.

If you own something of that description, or you act for somebody who does, the note on the first sheet lists exactly what to send. A postcode and a title number are enough to get a real answer back.

Back to the first sheet, where the tests are set out in full