Fire pits and leach fields

[Albabbie]

Hello all,

Last year I recently purchased a new home out in the country (finally got out of the city) and one of my first things I did on my 1.5 acre lot was build a masonry fire pit.  Mostly because it was relatively cheap to do, and my girlfriend and I are addicted to camp / bonfires. 

The bad news is I didn't even consider my leach field until after I completed the fire pit.  First place I've ever lived in that is not hooked up to a public sewer, and let's just say my education is coming along  .  Anyways, the fire pit itself is about 4 feet in diameter, and dug about 10 inches down.  The floor of the pit is tamped down gravel with firebrick on top, and the shell of the pit is made with pavers lined with fire brick.

In hindsight, I would have never put this pit where it is located (right in the middle of my leach field), and my question now is whether I can leave it standing or if it should be taken down.  I know that the surface area that my fire pit is now occupying is surface area I have effectively eliminated from my leach field, in terms of evaporation, etc, and that is never a good thing.  However, based on my leach field schematics, it still is a very small area compared to the size of my total leach field as a whole, which I would estimate is anywhere from 1/4 to 1/3rd of an acre!  Also based on the schematics, I got lucky when I built the fire pit, as it is not located directly over a pipe/trench, but rather is in one of the gaps between the trenches.

I have had zero problems with my septic in the year or so the fire pit has been standing, other than this summer where we have been getting incessant rain for weeks now, and now my leach field is starting to get a spongy feel to it, no odors, no problems in the house, I think my yard has hit its saturation point, and after a week or two of dry weather it will go back to normal.  Last summer the weather was great and had zero issues after the pit was installed (no spongy ground).

In short, should I bite the bullet and remove the pit, put in fill/topsoil and reseed or am I fine as is?  The cost of materials for the pit wasn't much, it was just a lot of fairly strenuous labor to construct.  The pit also sits in an ideal section of my property, but not so much so that I wouldn't enjoy it in another area off the drainage field.

Any thoughts or comments would be greatly appreciated