You'll know what were going on in the world by the end of March 2020, so I'll not go over it. The register went local along with everything else. We were walking from the house at that point, and the notebook puts it plainly: "we're walking from the house at present, which is the way of things just now." Castle Hill is within reach on foot from ours if you set off sharp, and I set off sharp, because I've been walking up that hill more or less monthly since 1976 and I weren't stopping in 2020.
Left shoe, black, a lace-up of the ordinary sort, laces gone. In the grass below the drystone wall on the north side. The eleventh shoe the Hill had given me over the years — it's been steady ground since 2010 — and the first one it gave me on foot from the house, which I didn't note at the time but I note now, because a shoe you've walked to lands different to a shoe you've driven to.
Cold and clear, and hardly a soul up there — the book records that, and the empty hill is the thing I remember most. Castle Hill with nobody on it is a strange sight and I'll leave it at that. The flask came in the small rucksack rather than the bag, because Our Linda had reorganised what went out the door along with everything else that spring. Photograph came out well. When the light's clear and there's nobody to wait for, the camera does its best work.
The Hill weren't finished with me that year, as it turned out. But that's for entries 175 and 182.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.