A layby on the A629 near Denby Dale. Not the layby. I want that plain at the top because the A629 at Denby Dale means one thing to readers of this register, and it isn't this trainer. The Layby Pair of October 2021 — numbers 198 and 199, the only pair ever recorded, side by side with the laces tied — were further down towards Denby Dale itself. This were a different layby, up towards the crossroads, and the two should not be run together, though I accept the road invites it.
I did check the other layby on the way past. Force of habit, the notebook calls it, and force of habit is what it were — three years I'd been checking it and three years it had been empty, and it were empty again that morning, as it has been every time since the pair went. Some ground stays significant after the shoes have gone. I don't make owt of that; I just check.
The trainer itself: left, black, on its side by the bin, laces tied. Reasonable condition. Grey day with drizzle on and off, the sort of weather that can't commit, and I photographed the trainer between showers and got what I got. Tea in the car after with the drizzle going on the windscreen, which is its own kind of sitting with a shoe, though the shoe were outside and I weren't. The notebook signs off 'nowt else to report', and that's the truth of it — but a black trainer three hundred yards from the most remarkable ground in this register's history still gets its number, same as anywhere else. That's the system. The system doesn't do location prestige.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.