This road is the only connection from my yard to the village road. The road in the picture was built around 1908 - about the same time as the place where I live was established. At that time the road was the main route for nearby houses. It connected a pier where passenger ships stopped, to a big sanatorium some kilometers to the north. The sanatorium saw patients and visitors coming from all over Finland and foreign countries as well. Nowadays neither the sanatorium nor the pier exists, and the village road (which didn't exists back int he 1908) has become the main route connecting the houses to the rest of the civilization. So, the old road just exists, without any kind of formal organization maintaining it. It is just me, and people who own forest by the road, who maintain the road based on mutual agreement. Today I was cutting the roadside thickets before they overgrow.
Picture album:
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Interesting... Who owns the road itself?
Now that is a good question! And, because of reasons I needed to find out the exact details. From the legal perspective it goes like this; the road itself is owned by the land owner(s). And then there either are, or are not, further definitions telling if the road needs to be there.
Imagine a case where a house is located further away from the nearest road, and then the only possible drive-way would go through neighbor's land. In such cases the connecting road can be established there with an additional requirement of it needing to be there. So, in such case the neighbor would still technically speaking own the road, but the road maintenance would be upon the house owner. Just that the land owner has no rights to destroy nor to remove the road, since it needs to be there.
OK, so in this specific case, I first needed to find out exactly where are the plot borders. It turned out that next to my yard I own half of the road, for the official location data says so. Which means that I own a small portion of the road. I also needed to find out if there is any legal document about the rights to use the road. There was an old document dating back to the early 1900's which said that my house "has the right to all the common roads which already are there", and my query triggered a register update, for the notion of "roads that already are there" isn't quite exact enough for the contemporary standards. I got to see map showing how the roads were at the time when my house was established. Some of those roads do not exists any more, but the road in the picture was there. So, the land register got updated, and now it clearly says that I have the right to use the road, and the road needs to be there. So that the other land owners who own other parts of the road have no rights to hinder my road maintenance =)
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