Emley ground has been good to me since the boot of 2017, and I've given it a look whenever I'm over that side ever since. This were one of those looks paying off. Right boot, black, steel toe by the weight of it — and I judge the weight by eye and situation, I don't lift them, but a steel toe sits in the ground different to a soft one and you learn the look — laces in, against the wall at the field edge with the mast above.
The book is honest about this one: it weren't owt out of the ordinary. Sound is the word the entry uses. A sound boot in a sound spot. But the register isn't a collection of highlights, it's a record, and a working boot at a field edge below Emley Moor mast is exactly the sort of entry that gives the highlights summat to stand out from.
Warm day, big clouds, the sort that keep crossing the sun so the light won't hold still for the camera. Four photographs. Flask conditions good, and the book records cheese and pickle eaten under the mast, which it then says never gets old, and it never has. That mast is the biggest thing in the district by a distance and eating a sandwich at the foot of it puts a man at a useful scale. I recommend it to anyone, shoe or no shoe.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.