Land Surveying. I love it.After having a desk job for 20 years I not have a career that I can truly enjoy.
Aside from getting me out from behind a desk, land surveying incorporates three disciplines that I are interesting. The typical survey is a process, research, field measurements and drawing.
The research is the first part of the evidence gathering phase of the survey. I read the deeds and the deeds of the abutting nieghbors. I read the deeds of previous owners going back as far as I need to determine how the the boundary was created. The central question in my mine is “What were they thinking?”
The field work is the most fun. This is the exploration of the property, finding any monuments that are mentioned in the deeds or other evidence of ownership and use like stone walls and fences or ipies in the ground that are not mentioned in the deeds. This phase is where I get the most physical activity draging equipment out into the field, cutting site lines and digging up buried monuments.
Finally I take the information from the deeds and the measurements I made on the ground and attempt to reconcile them in a drawing. This is always fun and interesting. There are always questions about how everything fits together or how things got the way it is. But this is grist for my mill, I rarely get called when everyone knows where the bounds are.
There is a lot to land surveying and in the posts that follow I hope you will find these post enlightening and entertaining.
What was the most bizzare thing that you discovered during a survey or research?
It is because there are so many strange and unusual things that come up in the course of a survey that compels me to write this blog. While the geography and topography of the land is always interesting it is people’s actions and behaviors with regard to their ownership and possession of the land that is most bizarre. As I research into the history of how a line was formed, I find evidence of these behaviors that most fascinate me because I am viewing people in a society long past. But then this past is our prolog and people really have not changed too much in how they behave toward one another. This is not a direct and succinct answer to your question of which situation qualifies as the most bizarre, but check in on my blog here from time to time and I guarantee that you will find it entertaining and perhaps even informative.