Instrument Copy for Registered Land in County Sligo

Reading an estate conveyance
Break-up transfers reserved rights and imposed conditions that still bind.

Checking a reserved sporting or fishing right
Where shooting or fishing was retained, the deed states its extent.

Quantifying an upland commonage entitlement
The deed defines the share and the ground over which it may be exercised.

Reading a right of way to hill or coastal ground
Access was granted formally where it was granted at all.

Examining a charge before redemption
The deed sets out what is secured and on what terms.

Investigating a covenant on a coastal site
The folio records that a covenant exists; the instrument states what it restricts.

Checking a turbary grant
Entitlements to cut turf are created by deed and the terms govern.

Acting on a family transfer
Earlier transfers set out reservations that bind later owners.

Reconstructing how a burden arose
Researchers work from the instruments rather than the register entries.

Preparing to answer requisitions
A purchaser's solicitor will raise the terms of every substantive burden, and having the instruments for a County Sligo property to hand at the outset shortens that exchange considerably rather than leaving it to run over several weeks.

Settling an argument from the document
Where neighbours disagree about what a registered right permits, the instrument is the only authoritative answer, and it is frequently shorter and clearer than either party expects.

Checking what a burden means before committing
Establishing what a registered entry actually requires costs very little compared with discovering it after contracts have been exchanged.

County Sligo packs mountain, plateau, estuary and dune country into a small area, and its instrument record is dominated by how the good ground between them was once held.

Large estates covered most of the county's productive limestone land through the nineteenth century, and their break-up in the last century is where the majority of consulted instruments originate. Estate conveyances were rarely simple transfers. A landowner selling off portions of a holding retained a great deal: sporting rights over ground sold, rights of way to land kept back, water and drainage arrangements, occasionally mineral or timber reservations, and conditions restricting what a purchaser might build or how the ground might be used. Those provisions were registered where they were registered at all, and they bind successors decades later.

Sporting rights are the most striking survival. A folio can record that shooting or fishing over the land belongs to someone else entirely, and the extent of that right — over what ground, at what seasons, with what access — is stated only in the conveyance that reserved it.

The Dartry plateau and the Ox Mountains carry commonage, with grazing entitlements created and quantified by grant in the western manner, and turbary follows the same pattern on the bogs.

The coastline is long and deeply indented, and coastal ground sold during the growth of tourism carries covenants restricting further building and use.

Registration came late to parts of the uplands and possessory title is more common there than in the east, so the instrument record thins considerably as the ground rises.

For anyone working on a Sligo title, the estate conveyance is usually the document worth finding first, because most of what constrains the land was written into it, and the entries that point at it on a modern folio are far too brief to suggest how much they carry.

An Instrument Copy gives you the text of a document lodged and registered against County Sligo land. It does not establish current ownership, show the registered extent, carry certification under seal, or reach anything that was never lodged — informal arrangements, rights acquired by long occupation, or deeds relating to unregistered land held at the Registry of Deeds. Commonage as actually grazed, the current exercise of a reserved sporting right and coastal erosion all fall outside the instrument record.

Delivery time:

The instrument is supplied as an electronic copy, sent to the email address you provide, so nothing waits on the post. Each order is checked against the entry you identified before it is sent.

Where the instrument cannot be located from the details supplied, where the County Sligo land turns out to be unregistered so that no lodged instrument exists, or where the burden you are asking about arises otherwise than by registered deed, we contact you rather than sending something that does not answer your question.