Putting up a sign—for example, ‘no parking’—is a useful & easy way to maintain a legal right, thus preventing prescriptive easements from arising. But what happens if the sign is ambiguous, misleading or inappropriate?
In this week’s NLJ, Thomas Rothwell and Kavish Shah, Falcon Chambers, look at a series of cases in which the intended meaning was not conveyed.
For example, Cleveland Golf Club’s sign was too vague, or perhaps too politely phrased. Instead of a clear ‘Keep out’, the club warned it could be dangerous to trespass on the course. Rothwell and Shah write: ‘The High Court held that, if the owners of the golf course had wished to make clear that walking over the golf course was objected to, it would have been easy for them to erect notices to that effect… As it happened, the wording sounded more like a health and safety warning. It was therefore insufficiently clear to bring home to passers-by that the use of the golf course was objected to.’
The authors present a clutch of cases. As they write, ‘The increasing body of case law in this area shows no sign of abating’.
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