Farnley Tyas is quiet ground. It goes months giving me nothing and then produces summat half grown into a hedge, which is exactly what happened here, and it's why the book says it pays to keep it on the round. You can't only walk the reliable ground. The register would be all reservoirs.
Left shoe, brown, the lace-up sort, laces present but perished — and perished is the right word, they crumbled to the eye without being touched. It were in the hedge bottom by the stile off Woodsome Road, half grown over, which told me it had been there a season or more before I go anywhere near the leather for evidence. A hedge doesn't grow round a shoe in a fortnight.
The nettles were an obstacle, the book records, and I used me stick, which is the approved method — you part them, you don't fight them. You want a clear look at a hedge-bottom shoe without flattening the ground round it, because the ground round it is part of the record. Warm and still, first proper summer morning of the year. Flask conditions good. Three photographs, two came out, and one of the two shows the shoe with the hedge growth over the toe, which is the photograph I'd have chosen if I'd been allowed to choose which ones came out, and for once the camera and I agreed.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.