Hester Vale kept the accounts for the yard at Colven Mouth, but her most heavily used book concerned water rather than money. Across its narrow pages she recorded soundings supplied by the yard's boats. Each entry paired a depth with a place, a state of tide and a description of how the measurement had been taken.
The book was intended for work inside the inlet. It offered no grand survey of the coast. Its attention settled on the bend below the timber stages, the soft patch near the old causeway and the shallow approach that visitors tended to mistake for a continuation of the main channel.
Vale did not average disagreeing figures into a comfortable answer. She placed them side by side, with the date and the person responsible. A note against one unusually generous depth explains that the lead had been dropped from a boat moving faster than its owner wished to admit. The figure remained, but acquired a warning.
Her drawings were economical. A shed could appear as a square, a post as a short stroke and a line of moored boats as a row of initials. These marks were sufficient for the people using the book. Their clarity depended on a shared landscape, rather than a claim that the page explained everything by itself.
Later additions use a different hand, but preserve her arrangement. The continuity is telling. Vale had made room for correction without making correction look like failure. The inlet changed, boats differed and measurements required judgement. A useful record gave its reader enough information to decide which previous answer could still be trusted.