[HN Gopher] Mysterious Victorian-era shoes are washing up on a b...
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Mysterious Victorian-era shoes are washing up on a beach in Wales
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 80 points
Date : 2026-01-06 06:34 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| kitd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The leather on those shoes are in nearly perfect condition! How
| can that be possible??
| cyberax wrote:
| Leather can survive for surprisingly long time in anoxic
| environment. E.g. in a swamp.
| CaptainDecisive wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why not fix the broken one?
| Maken wrote:
| Looking at those mesh-like patters in the shoes, makes me
| wonder how long each one took to be made.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Likely anoxic or anaerobic conditions where nothing
| decomposes. It isn't that uncommon in nature.
| mr_toad wrote:
| I wouldn't call those near perfect. Parts have clearly rotted
| away.
| tokai wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| Like bog shoes?
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If it was a graveyard you'd also expect many artifacts of
| different eras, not just Victorian era shoes.
| defrost wrote:
| Period specific mass graves aren't uncommon in the UK -
| plague, flu, killed in battle, etc.
| INTPenis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How about some local performance that recreated shoes from the
| Victorian period. That ended up in the ocean?
| xnx wrote:
| Garfield phones are still my favorite:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47732553
| metalman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| My hypothesis, since no-one mentioned it yet: beforeigners.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ASr0n5LnWnU
| jerrysievert wrote:
| still mad that when discovery took over hbo, they axed that
| amazing show.
| 6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote:
| reported before Christmas by the BBC 1.
|
| 1. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy84ezd4421o
| QuercusMax wrote:
| 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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