Wadsley Common has a stone circle, and the stone circle has a Bracken Man — thorn-bodied, ash-legged, coal-eyed — documented in an old poem that predates anyone currently alive. It emerges from the circle. It goes back. What it does in between is not recorded, which I find, on reflection, more alarming than what is.

Found a turquoise blood trail along Watersmeet Road this week — that specific shade that the murk takes when something denizen has bled out on it, not the crimson of human. Trail runs from the Malin Bridge confluence all the way to the crossroads at Walkley Lane, then nothing. Not faded, not pooled — just stopped, at the crossroads specifically. At two points along the route the trail goes thin and then thick again, which I'm recording as 'the creature stopped to tend itself' and refusing to consider alternatives.