Short answer. Yes. The way an easement is exercised can prescribe on its own, separately from the easement itself. If you have a right of way but stopped using a particular route, width or schedule for long enough, you can keep the easement and still lose that specific manner of using it.
What the law says
The form or manner of using the easement may prescribe as the easement itself, and in the same way.
Civil Code, Article 632 — The Manner of Use May Prescribe. Read the full provision →
Two different things that can be lost
It helps to separate the right from the way the right is exercised. The right is the easement — the entitlement to pass over your neighbour's land, to draw water, to drain, to keep a window. The manner is the concrete shape that entitlement has taken on the ground: which strip you cross, how wide it is, at what hours, by foot or by vehicle, through which gate. The Civil Code treats the manner as capable of prescribing on its own terms, and by the same mechanics that govern the easement itself. So the answer to your question is not simply yes or no — you can lose the route while keeping the right, or lose both, depending on what stopped and for how long.
Why this catches people out
The typical situation is quiet and gradual. A family has crossed a lot by the eastern side for decades. A fence goes up, and for convenience everyone starts using a narrower path at the back. Ten or twenty years later the servient owner builds on the old eastern strip, and the family discovers that the route they always assumed was theirs has quietly stopped being the one they can insist on. Nobody signed anything and nobody objected — that is precisely the point. Prescription of the manner works on the same footing as prescription of the easement, so the running of time does the work without any agreement or document being executed.
What this rule does not do
It does not let a servient owner erase an easement by simply making it inconvenient for a season. Nor does it convert every temporary change of habit into a permanent loss — an interruption during construction, a wet season detour, or a few years of not needing access is a very different thing from a settled abandonment of one manner in favour of another. The provision also says nothing about easements the law imposes for necessity, which are governed by their own rules on when they arise and when they cease. And it does not create a manner of use that never existed; you cannot widen a footpath into a driveway merely by using it that way once.
How to protect the manner you rely on
Write it down while it is uncontested. If the easement was created by deed, the deed should describe the route, width and mode of use with the same precision as the boundaries. If it was not, an annotation on the title, a survey plan, or a signed acknowledgment from the servient owner is worth far more than decades of undocumented habit. Keep evidence of continued use — utility connections, photographs, receipts for maintenance of the path. If a change of route is proposed, record that it is temporary and by consent. Where a dispute is already brewing, the timing of when each manner started and stopped becomes the central factual question, so reconstruct that history carefully before taking a position.