You can see half of Yorkshire from the ridge path near Emley when it's clear, and it were clear. The notebook says so in those words, and the eleventh of November 2023 goes down as one of those cold bright days the district issues two or three of a winter as a sort of apology for the rest.
Right shoe, brown leather, lace-up, laces in, below the mast in the rushes just off the flags. The flags along that ridge are old causey stones and the rushes crowd them close, so a shoe in the rushes is a shoe half-hidden, and I'll have walked past better-hidden ones up there over the years without knowing. That thought doesn't trouble me. The register has never claimed to be a census. It's a record of what were seen by a man who were looking, and on this day the man were looking and the shoe were seen.
Ground frozen in the shade, and I sat fifteen minutes with the flask, conditions good. The entry records that I thought about the Emley boot of 2017 while I were up there, as I generally do on that path — the one from the hollow below the ridge, the one I went to on the Heckmondwike question, and it wasn't the one. Six years on I still nodded to it, and three years further on, writing this, I nod to it again. Some finds stay resident in a place for you. The photographs came out — that light would have flattered a worse camera than mine — and number 258 went in the book under the mast, with half of Yorkshire watching, or at any rate visible.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.