Hundreds of shoes suspected to date from Victorian times have been found washed up on a beach – possibly from a shipwreck.
Workers removing litter for Beach Academy, a company working to restore rockpool habitats on the Vale of Glamorgan coastline in south Wales, found over 400 of the black shoes last week.
Beach Academy founder Emma Lamport said nearly 300 shoes had been found in one haul at Ogmore by Sea Beach on Thursday, December 18.
The founder added, “The strongest theory is that the shoes come from a shipwreck called the Frolic, which hit Tusker Rock about 150 years ago.
“It was carrying shoes and cargo from Italy.
“They were washed up the Ogmore River, and every now and then they appear, especially when there has been erosion of the riverbank.”
Emma, whose company has removed more than 12,000 items of litter from beaches, said they hadn’t ‘even started to scratch the surface’ of the cleanup effort.
She said: “We wish to restore rockpool habitats back to their original natural state by removing marine litter that has been there for some time, either embedded in sediment or trapped in the rocks.”
Located just under two miles south-east of Ogmore in the Bristol Channel, and measuring less than 500m across, Tusker Rock is known as a “ship graveyard.”
It has been suggested that the rock takes its name from Tuska the Viking, who colonised the Vale of Glamorgan.
Records show that around 80 people were lost when the Frolic steam packet was wrecked on the rock, with no survivors, on March 17, 1831, while on its way from Haverfordwest, in Wales, to Bristol.
Bodies are said to have washed ashore for months following the wreckage.
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