The conduit path below Deer Hill is level going with the moor above you and the reservoir below, and in late April with the curlews about it is that ground doing exactly what it should. The curlews made the notebook, as they generally do when they're calling. Some things go in the register because they matter to the record and some go in because they matter to the morning, and after sixteen years I've stopped pretending there's a firm line between the two.
Right trainer, grey, size eight or nine, laces in but loose. On the conduit path with the toe pointing at the reservoir — and I noted the pointing because position is data, not because it means owt. It doesn't. A shoe points somewhere because it has a toe, and that's the end of the matter.
We'd had a dry fortnight and the path were dusty, which the notebook records and which you don't often get to write about that path — it's usually the other complaint. Fair condition on the trainer, not long out. Sat half an hour on the stool. Cheese and pickle, and Our Linda had put a bit of fruit cake in an' all, which weren't asked for and were all the better for it. That's the sort of detail I'm glad the notebook keeps, because a year on I'd have remembered the curlews and forgotten the fruit cake, and the fruit cake deserves better than that. No photograph count in the notes for this one, so none claimed.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.