This one matters more to the register than the boot itself would suggest. Right boot, brown leather, one lace missing, heel worn down on the outside — a boot that had done some walking before it stopped. It were in the grass beside the conduit path on Deer Hill, and the morning were bright but bitter, which March up there usually is.
But the reason I stopped when I were transcribing this entry is the next line in the notebook: 'Flask were still warm at eleven, which I've decided is worth putting down.' That's the first flask note in the whole register. Number 75, the 14th of March 2015, Deer Hill. The flask had been coming out with me since 2009, but it took me five and a half years to realise it belonged in the record. There's no fuss about it in the notebook — I just decided, that morning, and from then on flask conditions are a standard field and have been ever since. I couldn't tell you what prompted it. Happen it were the cold, and the tea being warm regardless, and it seeming wrong that a fact like that should go unrecorded.
The photograph came out, 'more or less', which meant grainy. So this entry has a boot, the weather, a photograph of sorts, and the first flask reading. Looking back, that's the register more or less complete in its parts. The stool were still a year off, but I didn't know that then.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.