This is the one that were gone when I went back, and I'll set down the whole of it because the book holds the whole of it, both visits, and a lost shoe deserves its full account.
Fourth of May. Left brogue, dark brown, laces in, decent condition for open moor — a brogue on moorland is out of place the way a plimsoll on a layby isn't, and this one sat square on the edge of the track where it bends towards Deer Hill, as if set down. I record that it looked set down. I don't go further than that, because how it got there isn't really the point of what I do. Cold for May, hat weather, and I sat with it a while on the stool. Flask conditions good. Four photographs. A proper entry, done properly, and I drove home thinking it were one of the better finds of the spring.
Then the twenty-fifth. I went back to see how it were getting on, which I did with the notable ones, and it weren't getting on at all, because it weren't there. I looked along both sides of the track a fair way. Nothing. No brogue, no sign one had been, the moor looking the way the moor always looks, which is like it's never held owt in its life.
It were the first one I'd lost since the Notebook 1 days, and I'd forgotten what it does to you. You get used to the idea that they stop being there. It don't mean you have to like it. Marked lost in the book, both notations still clear on the page as I write this. It keeps its number. They always keep their number — that's the whole point of the system.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.