Hade Edge again. Anybody who follows the register will know the name from September 2022 and the child's red boot, which is one I still come back to in my mind occasionally, and the notebook makes the connection itself: this one were found not far from that one, though the entry is firm that I didn't go looking for connections and there aren't any. I'll repeat the firmness here. Two shoes near the same village a year apart is geography, nowt more, and a man who starts joining dots on a map has left my line of work for a different one.
The shoe itself were unremarkable in the way I mean as a compliment. Right boot, brown, laces tied, mud to the ankle line — a clean line of it, which suggests the boot had stood in mud rather than travelled through it, and that's an observation about mud, not a theory about the boot. It were on the roadside verge, in the grass.
First proper cold snap of the autumn, wind with an edge to it, and the entry is honest that this were a quick job: noted, photographed, back to the car. The flask stayed on the passenger seat and the tea held up, and I drank it with the heater going and the moor going dark-coloured the way it does when the year turns. That were the start of the brisk spell — seven shoes between late October and Christmas, and reading the notebook back now you can see the entries getting shorter as the weather got worse and the finds kept coming. Number 256 opened that run. It didn't know it, and neither did I.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.