Six foot by two foot four, at the same compass bearing every year. We have dug it, scanned it, and had the soil tested. It is ordinary garden soil and it is four degrees warmer than everything around it.
We have been in this house eighteen years. It is a bungalow on the edge of a village, built 1963, with a long back lawn and nothing interesting about it whatsoever.
The first winter we were here it snowed properly, four or five inches overnight, and I looked out of the back bedroom in the morning and there was a rectangle of green grass in the middle of a white lawn.
I thought, drain. Everybody thinks drain. A run of pipe with warm water in it will keep a line clear and you see it on pavements all the time.
It is not a drain. I will get to that.
The rectangle is six feet by two feet four inches.
I know that because I have measured it eleven times over eighteen years, in fresh snow, with a tape, in my dressing gown, and it is always the same to within an inch or two, and the variation is my measuring and not its edges.
Its long axis runs a few degrees west of north. I put a compass on it in 2011 and again in 2019 and it has not moved.
It is about nine feet from the back fence and roughly central across the lawn, and there is nothing above it. No tree, no wire, no washing line, no eaves. Open sky.
The edges are sharp. That is the part people do not believe until they see a photograph. It is not a soft patch where the snow is thinner. It is white, and then it is grass, and the change happens across about an inch.
Here is what we have done and I am going to be thorough because I know how this reads.
Drains and services. The house has a foul run and a surface run and both are on the deed plan and both go down the side of the house, not across the lawn. I had a drainage firm out in 2013 who put a camera down both and neither goes anywhere near it. There is no water main across the garden; the stopcock is at the front. There is no gas past the meter on the side wall. The electricity comes in overhead at the front.
Heat from below. That was the obvious one after drains. In 2013 the same firm put a thermal camera on it, in January, and it is warm. Consistently about four degrees above the surrounding lawn, right to those sharp edges, and the warmth has the same rectangle.
They said, that is a heat source. And I said, yes, that is what I am asking you about, and they said, well, it will be a services run, and I said, you have just put a camera down both drains, and they packed up and did not charge me, which I thought was decent.
Ground penetrating radar. 2016, a man from an archaeological outfit who does utilities work in the winter, three hundred and forty pounds and worth every penny for the report alone.
Nothing. Undisturbed subsoil to two metres. No void, no pipe, no cable, no cist, no wall, no fill. He was quite disappointed.
Soil. I sent four samples off in 2018, one from the rectangle and three from around it. The lab said they were the same soil and asked me what I was actually testing for.
We dug it.
That was 2018, after the soil results, and it took me and my brother-in-law a whole Saturday because I insisted on doing it properly: turf lifted in strips and stacked, then down in spits, everything sieved through a garden riddle onto a sheet.
We went down four feet across the whole rectangle.
There is nothing in it. Topsoil, then the clay, then more clay. A 1970s milk bottle top at eight inches, half a clay pipe stem which is normal for anywhere in this county, and a lot of stones.
We put it all back. It took another Saturday and the lawn was a mess until the June.
The next January it snowed and the rectangle was there, six feet by two feet four, in the same place, sharp-edged, in ground we had personally taken apart and put back.
The measurement is what I keep coming back to, and I want to say it plainly because I have never said it out loud to anybody except my wife, and I said it to her once, in 2019, and she asked me not to say it again.
Six feet by two foot four is not a rectangle of ground. It is a size. It is the size of a thing.
I looked it up, which I wish I had not. A standard adult coffin in this country is about six foot three long and about two foot at the shoulder, so it is not that, and I was relieved for about a day.
Then I found what six foot by two foot four is, and it is the standard internal size of a burial plot marker frame in some parish churchyards, and it is also, near enough, the size of a single bed of the sort they made in the fifties, and it is also the size of about four other perfectly ordinary things, and that is the trouble with a measurement. It will match whatever you are frightened of.
So I stopped. I decided it is six foot by two foot four and that is a fact and not a clue.
There is one more thing and it is the reason I finally wrote this down, which I have been meaning to do for three winters.
It has moved once.
Not the rectangle. The rectangle has not moved in eighteen years.
In the February before last we had a heavy fall on a Thursday and a second one on the Saturday, and on the Sunday morning I looked out and there were two.
The old one, in its place, exactly as ever.
And a second one, the same size and the same bearing, about four feet to the east of it.
It was there for the whole of that thaw, about five days, and I photographed it a great deal, and I measured it, and it is six feet by two foot four.
It has not been back. Three winters, snow on eleven days between them, and it is one rectangle each time, the original.
I have not dug the second place and I am not going to. I have thought about why not and the answer is not that I am frightened of what is in it.
It is that the first one was there for fifteen years before the second one turned up, and I do not want to know what the gap between them means, or what makes a new one, or how long anything gets.