Two parties, one strip of ground, one stated use
Every easement has two sides to it. On one side is the landowner, who keeps title to the ground. On the other is whoever holds the right, and what that party holds is permission to use part of the ground for the purpose its document names. Pulaski County's Unified Development Ordinance fits the elements into a single definition: a right that is deeded, set down in recorded writing, and given by the owner to another party for a specific limited use.
That definition lists its examples as access and drainage, water and sewer, and public utility. Each easement is drafted on its own terms, and neither Virginia nor North Carolina sets a statewide default for what one allows, so the scope of any particular easement comes out of its own document rather than out of a rule covering all of them.
Finding the recorded paper, including the old paper
Because it is recorded, an easement can be looked up rather than guessed at. It will normally be drawn on the plat, the recorded map of the lot, and described in the deed. In Carroll County both documents are kept by the Circuit Court Clerk, and anywhere else the county can tell you which office keeps its deed records. If some other part of the job already had you pull a plat, the answer may be sitting in that folder.
The index can reach a long way back. Carroll County's land record index can be searched online back to 1842 without paying a monthly fee, though that service does not show the recorded images, and seeing those takes either a paid subscription with a notarized agreement or a visit to the Circuit Court Clerk's office in Hillsville, 276-730-3070.
Once you have the document, the party it names is the one to ask what the right means for your plans, and that conversation belongs before anybody sets a form. On our side we put in the locate request for the digging our own crew does, and what comes back moves where the forms go rather than deciding whether the job happens. Whether a slab may sit over the strip at all is a separate argument, made in full on can concrete go over an easement, and the order a job runs in keeps the recorded question and the buried one apart.
Not the road, and not a zoning line
Three different instruments get called by the same loose names in conversation, and each one comes from a different place. An easement is a right someone holds under a recorded document. The strip along a public road falls inside the road authority's right of way, which in Virginia has its own published definition, and which takes its own permission; the right of way entry defines it. A setback is a distance set by a local zoning ordinance, and it exists only where a locality has adopted one.
A driveway can clear the setback, stay out of the road strip, and still run the length of a drainage easement nobody mentioned, so check all three before the concrete is ordered rather than after. If you want help reading the plat, bring it out when we come to measure; on work that runs along a lot line, walks and steps down the side of a house included, that visit walks the whole line anyway.