## Facts

- The Holbrooks owned unenclosed, hilly woodland containing a 10–12 foot wide, roughly 250-foot roadway initially cut as a coal haul road with their permission.
- The roadway’s historical use (coal hauling and later access to a tenant house) occurred with the Holbrooks’ consent.
- The Taylors bought an adjoining three-acre tract in 1964 and built a residence in 1965, spending about $25,000.
- The Taylors used the roadway to access their property and to build the house with the Holbrooks’ consent.
- With the Holbrooks’ express or tacit approval, the Taylors improved the roadway by widening it, installing a culvert, and placing gravel, incurring significant expense.
- Around 1970, after a dispute about formalizing continued use, the Holbrooks blocked the roadway (including by placing a steel cable across it), cutting off the Taylors’ access.
- The Taylors sued to remove the obstruction and to establish a continuing right to use the roadway.

## Issues

1. Whether the Taylors established a prescriptive easement by proving open, continuous, and adverse use for the statutory period.
2. Whether the Holbrooks were estopped from revoking permission because the Taylors foreseeably and substantially relied on the permission by building a home and improving the roadway.

## Decision

- The Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed the judgment for the Taylors.
- The court agreed no prescriptive easement existed because the roadway use was permissive rather than adverse.
- The court held the Taylors established a right to use the roadway by estoppel, making the permission effectively irrevocable after substantial reliance expenditures.
- The court upheld relief requiring the Holbrooks to stop blocking the roadway and to allow continued use.

## Legal Principles

- Under Kentucky law, easements may be created by express grant, implication, prescription, or estoppel.
- A prescriptive easement requires use that is open, peaceable, continuous, and adverse under a claim of right for the required period; permissive use defeats adversity and thus defeats prescription.
- A license may become irrevocable by estoppel when the licensor consents (expressly or by acquiescence) and the licensee, in reasonable and foreseeable reliance, makes substantial improvements or incurs substantial expense such that revocation would be inequitable.
- When such reliance is shown, equity may treat the continued right of use as an easement-like interest despite the absence of a written grant or prescriptive use.

## Conclusion

The court held that although the Taylors’ use of the roadway was permissive and therefore not prescriptive, the Holbrooks’ consent to roadway use combined with the Taylors’ substantial reliance in building a residence and improving the road estopped the Holbrooks from revoking access, creating an irrevocable right to use the roadway.


Holbrook v. Taylor, 532 S.W.2d 763 (Ky. 1976)