This is the one I'd want kept if the rest of the register went in a flood. The field gateway near Marsden is where number 1 were, October 2009 — right boot, brown, photographed on my phone because that's all I had and I didn't yet know I were starting owt. I go past the gateway now and then, the way you'd look in on a relative, but this were a proper visit, planned the night before. I told Our Linda where I were going and she said right you are, which is what she said in 2009 an' all, though neither of us could have known to note it at the time.
And there were a shoe in it. Right shoe, black, ordinary lace-up, laces gone, sole cracked across the ball. Sixteen years apart, same gateway. I want to be careful here the way I were careful in the notebook: I don't speculate on how, because that's not the point of what I do and it never has been. Two shoes, sixteen years, one gateway. Them's the facts and the facts are enough.
I measured nowt against the memory of number 1 because memory isn't a measuring tool, but I'll allow the one comparison the notebook allows: the first were a boot and this were a shoe, so nobody can say the gateway repeats itself. Condition consistent with a season or two out. Photographed properly this time, on the camera, from the same side of the gate as 2009 as near as I could place myself, which took some standing about and looking.
Flask conditions very good. I sat a good while — longer than the shoe strictly needed, and I knew it at the time and sat on anyway. The notebook entry ends 'it felt right, is all I'll put', and transcribing it a year later I've considered whether to expand on that, and I'm not going to. Some entries are finished when they're finished. Number 296, field gateway near Marsden, and the register carries on, which is the whole point of a register.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.