Mysterious Victorian-era shoes are washing up on a beach in Wales
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish_Sea_human_foot_discover...
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 ?
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>.
How could one afford to throw away a perfectly good non-matching shoe?
when shoes are hand made it makes sense to not make them only in pairs if only one shoe is needed
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.
No not at all. Embedded in sediment would preserve them better.
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.
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.