Sleet, this one. On and off all morning, the sort that can't decide what it wants to be, and the book records I didn't stop long on account of it, which were sensible and I stand by it.
Left trainer, white gone grey, laces missing altogether, under the bridge by the mill at Golcar. Size eight or thereabouts. The interesting thing, and the book notes it, is that the trainer were dry. Everything else on that towpath were taking a soaking and the trainer sat under the bridge untouched, which is the sort of small fact the register exists to hold. I don't draw owt from it. It were under a bridge. But it goes in the book because it were so.
One photograph. The book also records that the cheese and pickle were eaten in the car afterwards, which isn't how I prefer to do it — the proper way is by the shoe, weather permitting — but the weather weren't permitting and there's no sense being a martyr about a sandwich. I remember the windscreen going white while I ate it, though that's memory, not the book. Milnsbridge would give me the last shoe of this same year off the same canal, eleven months later, which I mention only because the towpath bookended 2019 without me planning it. Twenty-two shoes that year and the canal took three of them. Reliable ground, the Narrow. Always has been.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.