Mysterious Victorian-era shoes are washing up on a beach in Wales

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hundreds-of-mysterious-victorian-era-shoes-are-washing-up-on-a-beach-in-wales-nobody-knows-where-they-came-from-180987943/

87•Brajeshwar•1mo ago

Comments

kitd•4w ago

Fascinating story.

One thing that I don't understand though. The theory is they washed up a local river, got embedded in sediment and are only now being released. Given that, I would have thought their condition would be much worse. More likely that they were well-packaged on the wreck and have only just been released ?

brabel•4w ago

The leather on those shoes are in nearly perfect condition! How can that be possible??

cyberax•4w ago

Leather can survive for surprisingly long time in anoxic environment. E.g. in a swamp.

CaptainDecisive•4w ago

Not only for a surprisingly long time, but also in surprisingly good condition. For example at Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall archeologists have found not one or two, or even ten but over 5000 amazingly preserved Roman shoes that were apparently thrown away into the fortress's moat and survived buried in the mud <https://www.vindolanda.com/Blog/the-curators-favourite-shoes>.

Hilariously they're never found a pair of shoes, only singles. So that's why they think they were thrown away as rubbish, because one shoe broke so they threw it in the ditch. In the museum on site there's a fantastic "wall of shoes" on display where you can see the amazing leatherwork from 2000 years ago <https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/37305>.

mapt•4w ago

My prior understanding was that before the industrial revolution dramatically reduced the labor costs, clothing was expensive. Most people only owned two or three outfits, and replacing one would cost a month's wages sort of expensive.

How could one afford to throw away a perfectly good non-matching shoe?

em-bee•4w ago

they threw away the broken one after replacing it with a new one. they didn't replace the good one.

when shoes are hand made it makes sense to not make them only in pairs if only one shoe is needed

Wowfunhappy•4w ago

Why not fix the broken one?

Krutonium•4w ago

Sometimes the Cobbler tells you it's too far gone.

Maken•4w ago

Looking at those mesh-like patters in the shoes, makes me wonder how long each one took to be made.

nerdsniper•4w ago

*pairs of shoes were very rare, not nonexistent

Someone•4w ago

> Hilariously they're never found a pair of shoes, only singles.

From that first link: “These two little treasures were part of the hoard of over 400 shoes excavated in 2016. One would probably think that we have lots of pairs of shoes however, we only have a few. But this pair was easier to identify as they were small and have a less usual construction style as they do not have a seam that stitches them up over the toe and they were also found close together.”

Also, looking at those shoes, many of them don’t look beyond repair to me. Quite a few look like they’d need only minor repairs.

jandrewrogers•4w ago

Likely anoxic or anaerobic conditions where nothing decomposes. It isn’t that uncommon in nature.

mr_toad•4w ago

I wouldn’t call those near perfect. Parts have clearly rotted away.

tokai•4w ago

>More likely that they were well-packaged on the wreck and have only just been released ?

No not at all. Embedded in sediment would preserve them better.

jawilson2•4w ago

Like bog shoes?

jandrewrogers•4w ago

I am reminded of the many shoes[0] that mysteriously wash up in the Pacific Northwest. At least the ones in the article don’t have feet in them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish_Sea_human_foot_discover...

0x1ch•4w ago

Went to college around the area and worked for some of the tribes up there. Very interesting... mystery or something, I remember the the news around the 2019/2021 incidents.

b112•4w ago

I'll give a more gruesome reason.

They were attached to corpses, and the corpses are starting to completely decompose. Now the shoes fall off the feet. It could even be a local disturbance, such as something feeding on the corpses (crabs, etc) after the silt receded.

defrost•4w ago

That's reasonably probable save for "and the corpses are starting to completely decompose".

The geology of the island of Great Britain is such that it has a steady rate of coastal erosion .. a number of villages once inland "far" from the sea have been lost to the sea.

The villages of Clare and Foulness succumbed to erosion in the 15th century, that still continues to this day: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpwvj80yg40o

Old churches and their graveyards are lost, previously unkonown mass burial pits are exposed as cliffs erode away and the remains (bones, clothes, shoes, etc) are lost to the water sometimes before it's even noticed.

Possible, sure. On balance, given the large numbers all at once, the theory about old shipwreck cargo being breached and freed has somewhat more weight.

mr_toad•4w ago

If it was a graveyard you’d also expect many artifacts of different eras, not just Victorian era shoes.

defrost•4w ago

Period specific mass graves aren't uncommon in the UK - plague, flu, killed in battle, etc.

INTPenis•4w ago

Read the full story, we're talking hundreds of shoes. And we have a record of a cargo ship carrying shoes sinking 150 years ago.

thewanderer1983•4w ago

How about some local performance that recreated shoes from the Victorian period. That ended up in the ocean?

xnx•4w ago

Garfield phones are still my favorite: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47732553

metalman•4w ago

personaly,having found very old shoes, harness leather, beaded moccasins, and other probable organic artifacts, beach bone anyone? in a variety of useualy anoxic or acidic situations, I can then extrapolate, that these are common things to find if a person takes a moment to examine and confirm that they are historical artifacts, and all in all the top 10 to 100 feet of most of our planet is a good place to look for direct evidence of past human activity, use a microscope and now 100% of the planets surface has an artifact.

throw310822•4w ago

My hypothesis, since no-one mentioned it yet: beforeigners.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ASr0n5LnWnU

jerrysievert•4w ago

still mad that when discovery took over hbo, they axed that amazing show.

6LLvveMx2koXfwn•4w ago

reported before Christmas by the BBC 1.

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy84ezd4421o

QuercusMax•4w ago

That baby bootie is amazing. It's not very different than the ones I put on my kids when they were infants.

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