About surveying...

The metes and bounds description is a time-honored device for conveying real property, retaining much of the flowery language of its heyday, the Victorian Era. The literary style is largely intact today, not for tradition's sake but for legal reasons— the exact language of a conveyance is preserved as a perpetual reference to intents of the parties in the conveyance.

"Metes" means metering, as in walking along with some device that marks off increments of distance. In the case of the measurement of direction, the increments are in units of angle. A legal description preserves the sequence, the causality, of the walk. If an observed land boundary should be encountered along the way, whether physical in form or a previously written right, its "bounds" are called out as preeminent; and in the case of a written right, it is known as senior. The written cue that a bounds has been reached is the word to. To tells us to yield to the relevant physical location or document of the bounds, whichever is called out.

When writing a metes and bounds description for a parcel of land for the first time, a survey simply prepares the order of angles, lengths and bounds observed along the way. Usually, the description brings the survey back to its point of beginning (POB).