A couple of things come to mind here. First off My wife and I are in the middle of an ugly adverse possession suit with our neighbors and it’s a damned expensive way of saying I told you so. Second, I believe the issue you are dealing with is called a prescriptive easement.
The Free Dictionary by Farlex defines a: PRESCIPTIVE EASEMENT n. an easement upon another's real property acquired by continued use without permission of the owner for a period provided by state law to establish the easement. The problems with prescriptive easements are that they do not show up on title reports, and the exact location and/or use of the easement is not always clear and occasionally moves by practice or erosion. (See: prescription, easement)
If I read your description correctly, you heard a rumor that your new neighbor may want to keep you from crossing his pasture. As stated by somebody else I’d go to the neighbor hat in hand and see what develops in a conversation about say the way hay grows in that field or if maybe how he might like to kick something in to maintaining the road which you have generously been keeping up over the last umpteen years. You will know soon enough if he wants to close and lock the gate so to speak. At that point you may want to decide whether you want to spend $1000s of bucks on a nasty fight over an easement and whether the shortcut is worth a rift in the neighborhood.
Maybe the new neighbor is easy to do business with and you can work out some kind of win-win trade where you get an easement written into his deed and he gets you to mow his hay free for 5 years. Unless he agrees to voluntarily amend his deed to show the easement you hope for, it could get nasty and expensive. The only ones who benefit then are the $350 per hour lawyers and you might loose.
I am in Texas, which has very strict rules defining what constitutes adverse possession. They have a thing called a "casual fence", which is any fence which you can't personally get a witness to swear to it that they built it and what for. It doesn't matter how long it's been there. And if the only use of the land claimed as possessed was cattle grazing on perennial grasses it won't fly either. These rich Texans love the court system here.
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Today's Featured Article - Madison's County - by Anthony West. Philip Madison has been a good friend of mine for quite some time. He has patiently suffered my incessant chit chat on the subject of tractors for longer than I care to remember, and on many occasions he has put himself out, dropped what ever it was he was doing, to come and lend a hand cranking handles, or loading a find onto a trailer. Although he himself has never actually owned or restored a tractor, he was always enthusiastic and always around helping with other peoples projects.
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