The notebook gives it one line. Right boot. Brown. Field gateway near Marsden. Photographed it on me phone. That is the whole of the record for the first shoe, and I'll not dress it up now, because it were enough at the time and it's enough now.
I remember the day better than the notebook does, though I'm careful with that, because seventeen years is a long time and memory puts things in that were never there. What I'm sure of: I were walking up out of Marsden with no particular plan, and the boot were in the gateway, on its own, and I stopped. I couldn't tell you what the weather were doing. I weren't noting conditions in them days. I stood there a fair while before I got the phone out, which weren't like me, because I never used the camera on that phone for owt. The photograph's still on a card in the sideboard somewhere. Grainy. They all were, off that phone.
People ask, when they find out about the register, what it were about that boot in particular. I've never had a good answer and I've stopped looking for one. It were a boot in a gateway and I wrote it down. Everything since has come off the back of that one line, though I didn't know it that morning and wouldn't have believed you if you'd said.
I went back to that gateway once, a good few years after. Made a morning of it, took the flask. There were nothing there, just the gate and the mud and the wall, and that were fine. It's not a shrine. It's a gateway near Marsden. But I'll admit I stood there a minute longer than the walking required, and then I came home for me tea.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.