I've walked up Castle Hill more or less monthly since 1976, and in all that time it's given up very few, so when it does produce one the climb feels like it's been paid back with interest. Left trainer, white gone grey, just below the tower in the grass off the path. The detail the notebook makes a point of is the laces: tied in a double knot, which you don't often see on a lone one, and I'd not seen it more than a handful of times by 2023. I record laces the same way every time — present or not, tied or not — and a double knot earns its own line.
Blowy up there, as it generally is, and the book has flask conditions down as poor in that wind, which anybody who's tried to pour tea by the tower will understand. The wind takes the heat off it between flask and cup. I'll have drunk it anyway. I always do.
Photographs came out, plural, and looking at the entry now I can tell I gave it more frames than a grey trainer would normally get, which will have been the hill's doing rather than the shoe's. When a place has made you wait forty-odd years between offerings, you photograph what it offers thoroughly. It weren't done with me that year either — there were another off the Lumb Lane path come December, which were a strong showing by Castle Hill standards, two in a year. But that's a later entry. This one were the trainer, the double knot, and the wind, and that's plenty.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.