One sentence that carries the whole idea
Pulaski County's Unified Development Ordinance defines it about as plainly as anyone could want for a homeowner: an easement is a deeded right expressed in recorded writing, given by the owner of land to another party of specific limited use of that land, and the ordinance gives access, drainage, water, sewer and public utility as its examples.
Three words in that definition do all the work. Deeded. Recorded. Limited. You did not sell the strip and you did not stop owning it. Somebody else holds a written, recorded right to a named use of it, and what they may do to reach that use is whatever the instrument says. There is no statewide default in Virginia or North Carolina that we could find, and we are not going to invent one to make this page tidier.
The document itself is public. The easement normally shows on the recorded plat and in the deed, kept with the land records of the county where the lot sits, which in Carroll County means the Circuit Court Clerk in Hillsville, 276-730-3070. Finding it before you pour is a matter of an index search and a call or a visit, and anywhere else the county can tell you which office keeps its deed records.
The popular version is wrong in both directions
Two things get repeated about concrete and easements and neither one is a rule. The first is that concrete over a utility easement is illegal. We went looking for the statute that says so, in both states, and there is not one. The second is the mirror image, that it is your land so you can do as you like. That is not supported either.
What both states regulate, in real detail, is digging. Every provision we read governs notice before excavation, marking, hand digging near a marked line, and repair of the utility's own line. Not one of them says anything about a slab sitting on top afterwards. That absence is the honest finding, and it is why the two confident answers you will hear are both overreaches.
So this page stops where the sources stop. What your easement permits is in your easement. What the holder would actually do about concrete over it, and who would pay to put the concrete back, is not answerable from anything we read, and we are not going to guess at it. That one goes to the utility that holds the easement, and if the answer matters enough, to a lawyer. Naming the right desk is worth more than a prediction.
A road right of way is a different animal from a utility easement
Homeowners use the two words as though they were one thing. At the road they are not, and the difference changes who you call. VDOT's Land Use Permit Regulations define right of way to include the travel way and its boundary lines and the area in between, the subsurface below and the air above the property, and other permanent easements for a specific purpose appurtenant to it. It is wider than the asphalt. The same definition also covers rights of way where the Commonwealth holds a prescriptive easement for maintenance and public travel rather than ownership, so a homeowner cannot assume the state owns that strip outright.
The strip at the road is not yours to permit and it is not ours either. Work inside it takes written permission from the road authority, and that permission reaches only as far as the road authority's own interest in the ground goes. The point for this page is the limit rather than the mechanism. Clearing the road clears nothing about a recorded easement crossing the same frontage, because those are two different holders with two different instruments. What the entrance permit is, what it costs and what else it leaves standing are on the entrance permit answer and our entrance permit page.
North Carolina states the control side more bluntly, and writes it as a criminal statute rather than as a regulation: openings, interferences and structures are barred from a State road except under a written permit, and the Department holds complete and permanent control. A separate administrative rule then treats a residential driveway connection as the usual exception, with named conditions that can pull one back in. We do not tell a North Carolina homeowner they are exempt and we do not tell them they are in trouble. The District Engineer decides, and our North Carolina permits page says where to start. What belongs here is only that an easement holder and a road authority are not the same party and neither one speaks for the other.
Digging over a recorded line, and where that argument lives
Here the ground is firm, and it is also somebody else's page. Both states regulate excavation in detail: who has to place a locate request before ground is opened, how long the notice runs, how close a machine may come to a mark, and what has to happen when a line is hit. None of it is optional and none of it is this page's argument to make. It is written out statute by statute on our 811 and utility locates page, and how it fits a pour date is on the page about calling before a pour.
What matters here is the seam between the two subjects, because people run them together and then trust the wrong one. A locate ticket tells you where lines are today. A recorded easement tells you what somebody is entitled to do about them. Marks can come back across ground where no easement was ever recorded, and an easement can be recorded across ground where nothing was ever buried. Clearing the digging law settles nothing about the paper, and reading the paper settles nothing about what is actually down there.
What we do on a job with a line running through it
We place the locate ticket for the work we do, and we walk the marks with you before anything goes in the ground. Who owes that call on a job where somebody else cuts the trench is the digging page's question rather than this one's.
Knowing where an easement runs also changes the concrete, not just the paperwork. We can often move a slab, change its shape, or set the joints so that if the line ever has to come up, the cut lands on a joint instead of through the middle of a panel. A joint is not an approval and it does not give anybody a right they did not have.
The pour itself gets easier too. Our trailer mounted line pump sets up on solid ground and moves concrete the rest of the way through 2.5 and 3 inch hose, so a loaded mixer does not have to track across the strip you are trying to protect. The hose comes in sections and gets walked in by hand, so it goes over ground a truck has no business on. Bring the plat to the estimate visit and we will plan the slab around what is actually recorded.