Entity story · 4 min read · Set in Ashby Parish ·
It Was Always on This Side
Four times in thirty years a county surveyor has resurveyed the Ashby parish bounds and come up short, always by a metre or two, always against the same grey stag at dusk.
Ewan Rhys has surveyed the Ashby parish boundaries four times, in three decades, with the same chain and the same book of bearings, and the parishes come out smaller every time. Not much. Up to two metres at any one bound, and a surveyor's first instinct with a number like that is to blame the chain. He has had the chain calibrated twice. The chain is not wrong.
The first survey was standard letters and triangulation and a farmer at a gate with a mug of tea. The second was the year the Harlins and the Beakes went to court over a strip of nettles six paces wide, and were still arguing about a hedge that their grandfathers had shared without asking which side of it anything stood on. Rhys gave evidence. Both parties produced the same boundary stone. It read what it read.
The third survey was the year he first saw it at dusk, from the crest above the Beake pasture: a tall narrow grey shape standing exactly at the field's edge with its brow pressed to the hedge, still as a standing stone, and he took it for weathered oak until it moved — his notes, phrased to survive a second reader, say as much. It was stag-sized and taller than any stag he has since looked up. Its antlers were not antlers. They were the forked posts and strung wire of a field gate, carried open. Moss on the shoulder. It walked the hedge line slowly, line astern and low, the way a surveyor chains a boundary: pushing.
By the fourth survey — the one that produced this file — Rhys had gone out at dusk to walk the disputed length with Tomas Beake. The hedge had moved again. Two metres, net inward, off the Harlin side. The old stone was right there in the hedge base, and Beake turned it with his boot toe, and read it out, and the reading gave the hedge as the bound. Rhys tapes it with the chain — chain-length laid along the same line as the first survey, the same bearings, the same start. Two metres short. The stone read the stone. The chain read the chain. His book had the parish beginning at a different place than it had in the first file, thirty years and one family argument ago.
The disputes themselves are the part that the county finds hardest to minute. They are real. Harlins and Beakes, who had never needed a word for the other family's side, now keep solicitors' letters in the dresser drawer and speak of *the margin,* and the funny thing, Rhys has written, is that both of them are correct about it. Stand a Beake at one end and a Harlin at the other and ask them where the line runs; they will tell you the same thing. The stone reads correctly to both parties. The maps are redrawn and agree. Somewhere in the night a boundary has been moved, complete with its markers and its paper trail, in the manner of a rent-book balanced to the penny.
The parishes used to walk their bounds together, once a year — a public rite with a written order, both households in one day around the whole ring. The rite lapsed in Ashby after the churchyard walls were moved in the fifties; the hedges were doing the work, nobody thought the walking mattered. He sent a polite circular in the fourth year of the disputes suggesting a revival, old form. Neither family would walk with the other. He cannot say why he is certain, but he is certain that a bound walked by both parties together on the same day stays walked. One family walking is surveying. Two families walking might be something else.
And there is the matter at the middle of it. Plot the drift on one transparency, lay the four surveys thirty years deep on the lightboard, and the differences are not scatter. They enclose. All the net movement leans inward, all around one field, an irregular lozenge of pasture between the Beake orchard and the Harlin lane that has narrowed on every side and has never — not in the tithe, not in the deeds, not in the county's register of anything — been owned by anyone. It is grazed by nobody's beasts and cut by nobody's scythe, and it is in the middle, and the hedges of two parishes have been quietly making room for it, metre by decade, for as long as the surveys have been read. Beake said, when Rhys asked him who owned the lozenge field, that nobody did, and that it had always been so, and then looked at the hedge and did not offer the rest of the sentence.
Rhys wrote up the fourth survey with the findings in the order he could defend: the stone was correct, the chain was correct, the parish was smaller.
He has left the fifth survey unbooked. The transparency lives in the drawer with the stencils, and the file ends, in his own hand, with the note he has told no one he keeps.
What is running out of room for the field at the middle, and will the ring of hedges close before anyone thinks to ask who is enclosing whom?