Who is obliged to contribute to maintaining the access?

How it is supposed to be held together

Where developers care about this, they build a chain: each buyer covenants directly with the party entitled, and a restriction on the title prevents the next sale from being registered until the new owner does the same. That converts an unenforceable obligation into an enforceable one, one sale at a time.

Where the chain was never set up, or has been broken by a sale that slipped through, the obligation is likely to be unenforceable against the people who are actually there.

Your conveyancer can see whether a restriction exists on the neighbouring titles, and whether the chain has held.

What to do about it in practice

Find out what the arrangement actually is on the ground. Who has paid for work on the track in the past ten years, and on what basis — a formal obligation, an informal arrangement, or one exasperated neighbour.

Ask what state the access is in and what it would cost to put right, because if the obligation is unenforceable the cost will fall where it lands rather than where the deed says.

Where a track is important to the property — the only vehicular access, for example — the absence of an enforceable maintenance obligation is a real cost of ownership and worth factoring into the price rather than discovering afterwards.