Adjoining landowners, who own lands that share common boundaries  have mutual rights, duties, and liabilities.  Although, the reciprocal rights and obligations of adjoining landowners existed at common law it is modified by various state laws and court decisions.  One such right is prescriptive right.

Prescriptive right is an easement right upon another’s real property, generally an adjoining landowner’s by continued and regular use without permission of the property owner for a certain period of years required by the law of the state.  An easement by prescription generally is established when the prescriptive use is open or notorious and continued without effective interruption for the prescriptive period, and when the use was either adverse or pursuant to an attempted, but ineffective, grant.  To establish an easement by prescription, the claimant ordinarily must prove by clear and convincing evidence a use of the subject property, which is characterized as open and notorious, continuous and uninterrupted, adverse and under a claim of right, with the actual or imputed knowledge of the owner of the servient tenement.  An easement by prescription stands in all respects on the same footing as an easement acquired by grant.  It is held that even the right to cast water upon the land of an adjoining owner may be acquired by prescription[i].

[i] Grace Methodist Episcopal Church v. Dobbins, 153 Pa. 294, 25 A. 1120 (1893)