Proper October, this one. Cloud sitting on Pule Hill, visibility down to fifty yards, so it were the boot and me and not much else, which is the book's phrasing and I've never bettered it. Fifty yards of visible world, and a boot in it.
Left boot, black, hard worn, one lace remaining and that frayed, in the rocks near the old quarry workings on the top. Pule Hill's quarry ground is good honest terrain for a hard-worn boot — everything up there is weathered, the rocks included, and the boot didn't look out of place so much as of a piece with it. I sat with it a while regardless of the conditions, the book says, and 'regardless' is doing some work in that sentence because a fifty-yard October on Pule Hill is not sitting weather by any ordinary standard. But some finds want sitting with and you know them when you meet them.
Flask conditions excellent, needed too — the entry makes a point of both, and a flask at its best in cloud like that is worth more than a flask at its best in June, whatever the thermometer says. Five photographs, mostly grey, which the book notes were accurate, and that's the right way to think about photographs of weather. They're not poor photographs if the morning were grey. They're correct ones. The grey album from Pule Hill that day is among the most truthful the register holds.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.