You can see the Emley Moor mast from all over the district, but it's a different thing stood under it, and the notebook says exactly that, so I evidently felt it strongly enough to write down. The find were on the lane below the mast, in the long grass at the field side. Left brogue, tan, five eyelets, laces gone.
It had been down a season at least. The leather were bleached along one side where the sun catches, which is one of the honest ways a shoe tells you its history — sun bleaching doesn't lie about direction, and that brogue had lain the same way round for months. I recorded the bleaching and the eyelets and left the rest, because the rest is not really the point of what I do.
It were a fine spring morning, larks going, and the notebook shows I made a proper stop of it: stool up, sandwiches, both cups of the flask. Cheese and pickle. Five photographs. When the record shows both cups drunk on site, that tells you the quality of the morning better than any description could, because a second cup is only ever drunk somewhere worth sitting. Emley on the last day of April 2022 were worth sitting. I remember the mast making its noise in the wind high up, a sort of hum you feel more than hear, and the larks underneath it, and the brogue in the grass not bothered by either. A good entry. The spring of that year were full of them.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.