The water were very low at Brownhill that August, low enough that old walls were showing that are usually under, and the notebook records them — field walls walking down into the reservoir and not coming back up, from whatever were there before the water. After the summer we'd had, half the reservoirs in the district were showing their workings, and it were strange walking country for a few weeks, everything wearing a tidemark.
The shoe, to be clear, had nowt to do with any of that, and the notebook is careful on the point: it were above the old waterline, on the bank below the road, so it hadn't come out of the water, it had arrived the ordinary way, whatever the ordinary way is, which is not really the point of what I do. Right shoe, brown, lace-up, laces present and knotted. Condition poor, stitching gone along the welt. I make nowt of the low water and the shoe being neighbours. Two facts can stand next to each other without one being the cause of the other.
Overcast at last, the notebook says, and you can hear the relief in it — the first grey sky in weeks and the whole district glad of it. Flask conditions good. Cheese and pickle. Afterward I walked the circuit round toward Ramsden and found nowt else, which the notebook records as usual and fine, and I'd underline both words. A walk that produces one shoe has produced. A walk that produces nowt has still been a walk round Brownhill. The register has never once been disappointed and I don't intend to start it now.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.