There has grown up over the years in the textbooks a considerable body of rules to determine when the benefit of a covenant undertaken by one landowner in favour of another can be passed on to the latter's successor in title. However, no one is now quite sure how these rules are to be reconciled with the widely-drafted but little-litigated section 78 of the Law of Property Act 1925. Although intended, no doubt, to resolve the difficulties over this section, judgments in the Court of Appeal in Federated Homes Ltd v Mill Lodge Properties Ltd have been severely criticised by at least three writers. What I hope to show in this article is firstly that the decision in the case was correct although the authority given for it, partly in the writings of academics and partly in two earlier Court of Appeal cases, is unsatisfactory, since the academics have adopted a false premise and the judgments support the opposite conclusion; and secondly that the body of rules now in the books is not part of the law and ought to be removed from them.