The house. It doesn’t exist.

Not according to the council, anyway.

It’s not just that they can’t find the real owner – they’ve got no records of it at all. It doesn’t appear on any of their maps. It’s not listed in the county records, or the register of titles, or anywhere else.

The farm and the buildings do show up on satellite pictures, so I can at least prove that I wasn’t imagining everything. But no-one at the county office had connected the dots enough between satellites and maps to notice that while, according to them, none of it exists, it definitely does.

I showed them a shot of that map from the house. They showed me theirs. Comparing that county map to the county records, the farm is on land that was set aside as commons, way back in the seventeenth century. Which, from the look of it, was about when the first part of the house was built. But the commons weren’t enclosed, or privatised if you like, until at least a century later – which means that, according to them, the house can’t possibly have been built before then. But which, clearly, it was.

Round and round in circles. None of this makes sense.