Sparth is the small one, down by the canal at Marsden, and it doesn't get the attention its bigger neighbours get, which suits it and suits me. Left boot, brown, on the bank, half in the rushes. Laces gone, and the leather sodden and dark with it — a boot that had been in and out of the water a while by the look, the level at Sparth doing its rising and falling and the boot going with it. I recorded the condition as poor and the position as half in the rushes, toe outward, and that's as much as the bank would tell me.
Proper autumn morning. The mist sat on the water till ten or so and then lifted the way it does, all at once, like it had somewhere else to be. Flask conditions good. I gave the boot twenty minutes on the stool — the notebook is honest that the spot earned the sitting more than the boot did, Sparth being the sort of place that rewards sitting whether there's a shoe or not, and I'll keep that honesty in the transcription. Some shoes you sit with for the shoe. Some you sit with for the water. The register doesn't distinguish and happen it shouldn't.
Photographs were middling, the mist and the dark leather between them giving the camera little to work with, but I got two that show the boot and the rushes plainly enough. Left as found, obviously — half in the rushes is where it lived and half in the rushes is where it stayed. Third find of October, and November were about to come in busier than any month of the year, though of course I didn't know that on the stool. You never do. That's rather the nature of the work.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.