What happened to the 200 Victorian shoes that washed up on a beach?

Hundreds of centuries-old shoes that washed up on a beach last month are having to be kept in a bin filled with water in a woman’s home while their origins are verified.

The black leather boots, thought to date back to the early 1900s, were discovered by volunteers cleaning up rock pools on Ogmore-by-Sea beach in the Vale of Glamorgan.

Emma Lamport, from the Beach Academy social enterprise which found the shoes, said she needs to keep them for the next 12 months while officials try to establish where they came from.

She said she had been contacted about them by people all over the world, adding their future homes had already been secured, with an art installation, university students, a heritage museum and even clog makers among those interested.

“It’s gone global. We’ve had contact from absolutely all over – America, Australia, New Zealand, all over Europe,” said Emma.

“We’ve been finding more, and local people have been bringing some in the same style that they’ve been finding as well – all along the same coastline.”

The shoes have “engulfed” the volunteers in recent weeks but it has also been interesting to discover more about where they came from, Emma said.

She explained the shoes had since been reported to the Receiver of Wreck (RoW) – a part of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency government department which handles apparent salvage wreck material across the UK.

They have instructed her that she must keep the shoes for 12 months while they “try to find out where they come from”.

“They are being stored in Ogmore at my house. They’re in water, they have to be kept wet, dark and cold. They’re in a huge bin,” she said.

She added Cardiff University had offered to store them for her, which she hopes to do once she gets the green light from the RoW.

“We can’t keep hold of absolutely everything, it would be too much,” she said.

Emma explained Beach Academy had been doing a restoration project since September in a bid to clean up marine litter which can become embedded in rock pools.

She said they had been “very surprised by the reaction” to the shoes, which had perhaps been due to their quantity or age, but the group wasn’t surprised by the discovery itself; it also recovered a Pepsi can from 1973 and a Colman’s mustard tube from the 1930s.

“That’s the whole point of the project, it proved how long it lasts when you don’t get rid of it properly,” she said.

The RoW’s job is to ascertain who owns wreckage material and it became involved because the “theory which has come out on top” locally is that the shoes could be from a shipwrecked Italian cargo vessel said to have struck nearby Tusker Rock about 150 years ago, 3km (two miles) west of Ogmore beach.

If that were the case, there is a good chance an owner won’t be found and the RoW will be able to take the shoes, or Beach Academy will be able to distribute them as they wish.

Emma said she would be meeting a curator at St Fagan’s Museum in Cardiff next week to discuss the find and an expert from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC had already dated the shoes to about 1900 by examining photos.

“We are trying to get the age and the style verified,” she added.

“We really don’t know [where they’ve come from]. There are so many theories.”

Emma said she planned to give some to Cardiff University so its students who study ancient artifacts could examine them.

She added St Fagan’s had requested some, an artist hoped to turn some of the fragments of shoes into an art installation, and Ogmore Community Garden wanted to display some.

Emma said she had even been contacted by someone from the Netherlands who would like to up-cycle a pair into clogs.

While she has also received offers from people willing to buy the shoes, she is not interested in this option and said she hoped they would instead offer “art, awareness, education and community” benefits.

The RoW confirmed the shoes had been “legally declared”, “as they have the potential to have come from a shipwreck”.

“Every item reported to the Receiver would have had an owner, as such they have a year to claim the items on proof of ownership,” it said.

“The Receiver will work with the finders, historians and other heritage bodies to investigate the origin of the shoes, as well as their historical value. Should no owner be found within the year the items will become the property of the Crown.”

It added that, in cases where items are considered of value to UK heritage, it worked with the finder to find “a suitable home or repository for the items” but if the owner cannot be traced or the item has “low historical value”, the finder “may be permitted to keep the items”.