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An educational center in Wales is trying to solve the mystery of hundreds of Victorian-style shoes found during a beach clean-up.
The Beach Academy CIC, based in Porthcawl, said volunteers working on a rock pool restoration project at Ogmore Beach in South Wales found about 200 shoes and detached soles in late December.
“We could tell straight away they were old. The shapes of them were clearly old-fashioned, with hobnails in the soles,” Beach Academy founder Emma Lamport told The Telegraph.
Local residents revealed they had been making their own shoe discoveries on the coast for years.
“Locals have been relating stories of finding strange shoes along the South Wales coast,” Lamport told Fox News Digital.
She said officials currently have two main theories about the origins of the footwear.
The first theory is that they fell from a cargo ship called the Frolic, which was carrying cargo from Italy when it wrecked on nearby Tusker Rock in the 19th century.
“They were washed up the Ogmore River estuary and, every now and then, they appear… especially when there has been erosion of the river bank,” Lamport said.
The other theory is that cobblers during the 1960s would dump the shoes and boots they couldn’t mend into the Ogmore River.
