A working boot, this one. Right, black, steel toe sort, on the path along the dam top at Scammonden. Laces gone. A heavy boot — the notebook says work boot twice over, in effect, and being on the building side myself I know a steel toe when I see one. They don't wander far as a rule, which makes a lone one on a dam top a proper entry.
Scammonden dam top on the fifth of November is not sitting weather. The wind comes straight up the valley off the motorway, the notebook says, and flask conditions are marked poor, tea cold by eleven. Eleven is early for cold tea and tells you everything about that wind. No mention of the stool and I'd not have wanted it up there — the wind would have had it.
The photograph didn't come out, which given the conditions I'd have half expected at the time. So the Scammonden boot survives as words only: heavy, black, right, laceless, steel in the toe. Some of the best entries in the register have no photograph, and I've stopped minding. The notebook were written with cold hands that day — you can see it in the pen — and it did its job all the same.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.