So, you have seen the parish maps and are motivated to increase woodland cover in your parish and need to speak to a specific landowner to encourage them. How can you find them? If you know a local farmer then the chances are that they know exactly who owns the land in the vicinity, so it is worth speaking to them. On the other hand you might not know any farmers and finding who owns a specific patch of land can be difficult. There are a number of methods you might use:

Method 1: You can use the Land Registry”s Find a property – detailed enquiry form, but you have to know either the property address or the title number, which might not be obvious. A featureless field has neither an address or a number so this method might not help.

Method 2: You can use the Land Registry’s Aerial Land Locator service. This works effectively but you have to be very zoomed in and you can’t see where the land parcel boundaries are. Having found the property you can obtain the Title for the cost of £3 per title. You can also obtain the parcel’s plan at an additional cost of £3.

These methods may be sufficient but it would be useful to have an overview map of land parcel boundaries together with the opportunity woodland map. This would allow you to identify parcels relevant to a specific patch of opportunity woodland.

Method 3: Using the INSPIRE Index Polygons together with the opportunity woodland map you can find the INSPIRE Index numeric identifier and look up the parcel’s title on the Land Registry INSPIRE ID enquiry form. Again this will cost you £3 and from the title you can discover the owner(s) of the parcel. You may then want to politely engage with them about the possibility of tree planting in relation to opportunity woodland.

Get the INSPIRE Index identifier, enter it into the Land Registry site, pay £3, download the title and get the contact details

Some things to know about INSPIRE Index Polygons

INSPIRE Index Polygons are shapes (polygons) that relate to land titles and each one has a unique numeric identifier. The shapes may or may not relate to one land title and sometimes the land parcel is made up of more than one index polygon. The parcel may get chopped up into a set of smaller polygons, each of which has a unique identifier but which all relate to the same Title. You don’t want to waste money buying the same Title document repeatedly so you may need to interpret the jigsaw of pieces that make up the title.

There may be multiple INSPIRE polygons that all relate to one parcel of land / land Title. These six probably all relate to the same parcel of land. You need to interpret the patter to avoid buying six copies of the title rather than just one.

Online Tool

There is an online tool to help you do this in the Chew Valley. To view the INSPIRE polygon identifiers you need to be zoomed in.

Who Owns the Chew Valley?

Once you have found the INSPIRE identifier you can type it in to the Land Registry site and pay £3 to get the land title details.