Locals in a small coastal village in South Wales are puzzled after hundreds of old black leather boots, looking like they are from the 1800s, drifted onto the shore.
People helping with trash cleanup found the footwear stuck in tidal pools at Ogmore-by-Sea, a spot right on the Bristol Channel. Angela Ferguson from BBC Wales notes that in just a single week at the end of December, the group pulled 200 boots from a tiny section of the beach. Since September, the total count of recovered shoes has gone over 400.
Even though the scavengers are finding different types and cuts, everything seems to date back to Victorian times. You can see that nails were used to hold the soles in place.
Emma Lamport, who runs the outdoor education group Beach Academy, told BBC Wales that while some boots are clearly men’s styles, a few are actually preserved quite well.
Back in December, the Beach Academy team shared pictures online hoping that the public might know what they were looking at. Their post mentioned that the items look like history pieces instead of anything you would wear today. They explained that they are carefully digging the boots out of the mud and rocks in the tidal pools, noting that it is anyone’s guess how long the items have been stuck there, though they surely have a tale to tell.
A shipwreck that has been long suspected
A few locals joined the discussion to share their own strange finds, including one woman who noted that she has picked up bucketloads of the shoes over time.
Currently, the main idea is that the boots came from an Italian merchant ship that wrecked in the area around 150 years ago. The Beach Academy told Tom Hale at IFLScience that the ship’s goods, including the footwear, floated up the Ogmore River and emerge every so often, mainly when the riverbank erodes.
That ship went down after crashing into a formation called Tusker Rock, situated about two miles away from the shore where the boots are landing.
No matter the real reason, Peter Britton told BBC Wales that the boots serve as “small souvenirs from the past.” Britton is the artist behind the “Ghost Ships and Tides” show from 2023 at Swansea’s National Waterfront Museum, which featured his pictures of Tusker Rock.
Lamport mentioned to Eric Williams at the Telegraph that the team felt “a bit unsettled because we didn’t know where so many of them were coming from.” She added that “when you have something this ancient, the backstory is a total puzzle.”
These boots were made to last
Old shoes have actually been in the news before. Back in August 2019, a hiker in Norway spotted a leather sandal styled like a Roman shoe sticking out of the snow, dating back 1,700 years. Then, in the autumn of 2023, researchers digging in an Austrian salt mine dug up a 2,000-year-old leather shoe that still had a piece of what was probably a shoelace attached.
Also, during the summer of 2025, huge leather boots were uncovered by a team working at a Roman fort close to Hadrian’s Wall. Just recently, experts found a 650-year-old sandal woven from grass and twigs sitting inside an ancient bearded vulture nest in the south of Spain.
If we can get a lesson from all this, is that traditional leather shoes are far more durable than so called eco-friendly polymer materials. Do you think your Air Jordans will stay in such good condition over the centuries as these boots have? That’s what we thought too. So next time your vegan friend tries to tell you that vegan-leather is durable and ecological (despite being nothing more than well-marketed plastic), nod politely, change the conversation, and make a mental note to have your favourite Balmoral boots resoled at your local cobbler’s!