Wessenden is my ground, and this were a proper Wessenden find. Left boot, brown, laces in and knotted, the upper cracked right across the toe. The notebook says it had 'been out a while by the look of it', and a cracked upper on a moorland path means at least a winter, in my experience, though in 2015 I hadn't yet seen enough weathered boots to say so with the confidence I would now.
It were on the path edge above the second reservoir. Cloud were down on the tops when I set off — I'll have gone up at half seven, as usual, though the notebook doesn't say — and it cleared by ten, which the notebook does say, because by then the weather were always worth recording. Flask conditions fair.
Photographs didn't come out, plural, so I tried more than once and got nowt for it. That boot will be long gone now, or else it's still there and weathered past recognising. I've walked that path plenty of times since and never knowingly passed it again, but I'd not swear it weren't there. A brown boot on a brown moor keeps its own counsel.
Written up August 2026, from the notebook.