Not rubbish. A lantern. One of the good ones, glass-sided, wire handle, and it had come in from somewhere with enough weight behind it to flatten a path in the grass behind it.
There was a snail asleep inside it. A different snail.
"Right," I said. "You first."
So the snail was carried to a damp stone and told where it was going, and only then did the lantern get picked up and taken back to the step, where somebody found it later and I should think assumed it had been sitting there all along.