Survey work in Belgium #27 (pics)

A little bit history and boundary work in Belgium.

We're involved in a lot of infrastructure projects, public and private works, so determining the boundary between private and public domain along our roads and canals or pure private when there's a new subdivision or a sewage line to be constructed on private land is one of the tasks we have to deal with..
Most of our surveyed maps (Cadastral and Atlas of the roads) find their origin in the early 1800 years when Napoleon Bonaparte needed money to finance his wars.

These old giant (French) books are recently scanned and digitally available online.

We have frequently problems with the old road maps, they give only widths on some locations and if they’re tied in to corners of buildings these are mostly gone, so then the only approach is the one of the ‘best fit’.

So our Cadastral system was set up to identify the owners (the ones that will pay the taxes) and to measure the whole French empire to get rid of arbitrary estimates. At the moment of the survey there was almost no boundary research, the maps indicated some fences or cross cultures, buildings, a perimeter and an area. Later the Belgian Cadastral Land surveyors continued these surveys, again without boundary research. We still consult a lot of the old sketches if nothing else exists.

Our system has of course evolved during the years but it's still this system on which the Department of Finance raises taxes on a yearly base for what is called the Cadastral Income (A netto annual rental income)
So our Cadastral maps and surveys have little legal value when it comes to boundary. Some of the property sales are still done purely based on the known Cadastral Area, without a surveyed map. that's the case when the perimeter doesn't change and the buyer does not see the value of engaging a land surveyor. (I suppose this last reasoning sounds familiar to a lot of us)

The survey maps differ a lot from what I see on the board here, we only have a graphical part and a legenda, not much of descriptions. The old maps mentioned only a perimeter with distances and an area. most of us now give the corners in coordinates, state plane or local depending on the equipment of the land surveyor. No bearings on the maps, no bearing trees in the fields, never heard of these until I arrived here.

Our country is not divided in (orthogonal) sections such as most of you know them, we have Cadastral sections but these are more natural borders, ditches, roads, canals, ...
So we don't have sections corners or markers that we can look for or tie in.

In the field we have a tradition of placing cornerstones, poles at every corner or kink in the line,

Below a BS (Belgian State) pole determining the border between public and private

The national railroad company has their own type of poles

I know of only one surveyor in the region here who used rebars instead of poles. I like the idea of the personalized caps but we don’t have them so when you find a pole you have to search the registry or Cadaster office who the surveyor was that placed them and made the survey map if the (adjoining) owner can't help you.

We have a lot of fenced properties but here again no one knows for sure if these fences are really on the border. In rural areas we sometimes have solitaire trees as markers.

Christof.