The Standedge Tunnel puts its mouth to the hillside at Tunnel End, where the towpath comes up to the visitor centre. Fine warm morning, plenty of folk about, and the tunnel doing its usual cold breath, which you can feel ten yards off even in July. If you've stood there you'll know it, and if you haven't, it's worth the trip on its own account — three and a bit miles of hill breathing out at you.
The boot were upright on the coping by the canal, facing the tunnel. Right boot, tan, laces missing, salt marks on the leather, condition fair. The notebook records that it were facing the tunnel and records nowt more about it, and I've read that line a few times while writing this up and each time concluded the same: correct as written. Position is fact. Facing is fact. Anything past that is not really the point of what I do.
With the visitor centre trade about, I took me photographs efficiently — the notebook rates them good — and carried the flask along toward Sparth, where it's quieter, and had it there. That stretch between Tunnel End and Sparth is one of the better hundred yards in the district for a cup of tea, and I say that as a man who has compared. Number 224, then: a tan boot at the mouth of the longest canal tunnel in the country, upright, facing in, with the hill breathing cold on the both of us. Recorded. Left where it stood. Home by dinner, and the salt marks still on me mind at the table, though I said nowt about them to Linda, as there were nowt to say.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.