I've been walking up Castle Hill more or less monthly since 1976, so the odds were always that it'd give me a shoe eventually, and this were the one. Left trainer, black, laces tied, against the wall below the tower on the north side.
What the notebook makes a point of is the snow. Snow still lying at the end of March, and I wrote that I had not seen that before, which after thirty-odd years of going up there monthly is a statement with some weight behind it. That were the cold spring of 2013 and folk round here will remember it. The shoe itself were unremarkable — a black trainer, laces tied, sat where somebody or something had left it. I didn't speculate then and I'll not start now. No photograph is recorded. The snow at the end of March is the thing I still think about, more than the trainer, if I'm honest about it.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.