Riparian Drainage Systems - Riparian Rights & Responsibilities

This applies to any kind of watercourse passing beneath the curtilage of your property, you may not gain benefit from the brook, culvert or land drainage system passing through your boundaries, you may not even know it is there but you are responsible for its maintenance and upkeep.

Riparian rights and responsibilities are always a gray area and a subject that we get a lot of mail over as it is a thin line between a riparian culvert and a shared drainage system passing through someone else's land, proving that the system is shared and used by other properties or highways drainage is often the key to defining ownership but nobody wants to fund such investigations when they do not believe that it is their responsibility in the first instance

back to top