Second Castle Hill entry of the year, which happens with the places you go most — the register's said so before and it'll say so again. Left shoe, black, plain, laces missing, on the path below the tower. Hard frost that morning, the ground ringing underfoot, the notebook says, and I remember that ring, or I remember Decembers like it, which after five years amounts to much the same thing.
I've walked up Castle Hill more or less monthly since 1976, so by 2021 that's somewhere past five hundred times up, and it still finds ways to hand you summat. Two shoes in one year is the hill being generous. I noted in the entry that January's trainer, number 183, were halfway up the Almondbury side and this were below the tower, so it had at least varied the presentation.
Flask conditions very good — frost mornings generally are; the cold sharpens the tea somehow, or sharpens the drinker. The photograph came out well against the frost, black shoe on white ground, the sort of contrast the camera can manage even with its habits. Home for dinner with the year nearly done and one entry still to come, though I didn't know that stood on the path. You never know which one's the last till the notebook closes.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.