Folio and Map for Any Property in Ireland

A folio is the register entry for a parcel of registered land in Ireland. It is kept by the Property Registration Authority and divided into three parts. Part I describes the property and gives the map reference. Part II names the registered owner and states the Nature of Title, which may be absolute, qualified, possessory or good leasehold. Part III lists the burdens affecting the land – charges, rights of way, wayleaves, covenants, turbary and grazing entitlements, and anything else registered against it.

The Land Registry map, sometimes called the title plan, is the graphic half of the same record. Each folio carries a plan reference, and the mapped parcel identified by that reference is what the folio describes in words. Without the map a folio tells you that a person owns land in a townland; with the map you can see which land.

The pairing matters because the two documents fail differently. A folio read alone gives ownership and burdens with no idea of shape, frontage or extent. A map read alone shows a parcel with no indication of who owns it, on what class of title, or subject to what. Nearly every professional use of the register – a sale, a mortgage, an estate, a boundary question, a site being separated from a larger holding – needs both halves at once.

What neither half supplies is a conclusive boundary. Registered boundaries in Ireland are general boundaries: the mapped line shows approximately where the division between properties runs, not its exact legal position. A folio and map will tell you what is registered and roughly where it sits, and a dispute about the precise line is resolved by other means.

Registered land in Ireland is mapped, and understanding how it is mapped explains most of what a folio and map can and cannot tell you.

Every registered parcel is plotted on a national mapping framework based on Ordnance Survey mapping, and each folio carries a plan reference tying its written description to a specific parcel on that framework. The system was maintained on paper for most of its life and has since been digitised, so a modern order returns a plan generated from the digital record rather than a photocopy of an old sheet. The underlying survey, however, is often a great deal older than the digital version of it, and features drawn from a nineteenth-century survey can persist on a plan long after the hedge, wall or drain they represent has gone from the ground.

The single most important rule attaching to those plans is the general boundaries rule. Registration in Ireland does not determine the exact line between two properties. The mapped boundary shows approximately where the division runs, and the register is not conclusive as to its precise position. A purchaser who reads a title plan as a survey-accurate delineation of what they are buying has misread it, and boundary disputes are resolved through the instruments, physical evidence and, where necessary, the courts rather than by measuring the folio map.

Folio numbering is organised by county, which catches people out regularly. A folio number is only meaningful with its county attached, because the same number exists in most counties. An order placed with a number alone, or with the wrong county, returns the wrong property or nothing at all.

Compulsory first registration was extended county by county over several decades and reached Dublin and Cork on 1 June 2011, so registration on sale now applies across the State. Land that has not changed hands since then may still be unregistered, in which case no folio exists and the title rests in deeds recorded at the Registry of Deeds instead.

Send the address and Eircode of the property, or the folio number together with its county. The county matters – folio numbers repeat across the country, so a number on its own is not enough to identify a property.

If you do not have a folio number, that is the ordinary case and no obstacle. Our team locates the folio from the address, confirms the property before anything is prepared, and comes back to you if more than one registered parcel matches so that you order the right one.

For agricultural land, a townland name and an approximate acreage identify a holding more reliably than a postal address, and it helps to say at the outset if the farm is spread across more than one parcel.