Since September 2025, volunteers from Beach Academy have stumbled upon more than 400 pieces of footwear, largely made of black leather, at the little coastal town of Ogmore-by-Sea.
Beach AcademyIn total, 437 boots have been found along the shore at Ogmore-by-Sea.
Residents of a seaside village in southern Wales have recently been left baffled after hundreds of Victorian-era black leather boots mysteriously washed up on the beach.
The boots indeed seem to date back to the 19th century, but why they are washing ashore now remains shrouded in mystery. The leading theory, however, is that they came from the wreckage of an Italian ship that crashed into Tusker Rock just off shore, though that has yet to be confirmed.
The Discovery Of More Than 400 Victorian Boots On The Beach At Ogmore-By-Sea
In a single week in December 2025 alone, volunteers with Beach Academy, which is working to restore rockpool habitats along the Vale of Glamorgan’s coastline, picked up nearly 300 boots in just one small area of the beach at Ogmore-by-Sea. To date, more than 400 boots in total have been found since September 2025.
“Some of the boots are in pretty good condition and with some you can very clearly see they are a men’s boot,” Beach Academy founder Emma Lamport told the BBC.
Beach AcademyBeach Academy’s Emma Lamport hauling boots from the shore.
While the sheer abundance of the boots found along the beach is certainly abnormal, it is not the first time that local residents have found washed-up footwear. Social media posts from years past show that people have found the occasional odd boot from time to time, but nothing like the phenomenon that is now being seen.
“We found one patch which was just strewn with shoes. To find so many in such a small area – I mean, we didn’t even do the entire beach – was a real surprise,” Lamport told The Telegraph.
“We were a little bit unnerved because we didn’t know where they’d come from in such large numbers. With something so old and historic, the story is a real mystery.”
Naturally, people began to wonder where all these boots were coming from.
Possible Links To The 19th-Century Wreck Of The Frolic
Beach AcademySome of the black leather boots, still in fairly good condition, given their age.
One theory, Lamport explained to Bristol Live, is that the boots were originally being transported on a ship carrying cargo from Italy during the Victorian period.
“The strongest theory is that the shoes come from a shipwreck called the Frolic, that hit Tusker Rock about 150 years ago,” she said. “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 river bank.”
Historical records show that the Frolic indeed wrecked on Tusker Rock on March 17, 1831, on its way to Bristol, leaving approximately 80 dead and no survivors. For months afterward, the bodies of its crewmembers washed ashore. Still, why would the boots it was carrying – if indeed it was carrying boots – just be washing ashore now?
Dr. Michael Roberts of the Bangor University School of Ocean Sciences, who studies shipwrecks around the Welsh coast, told the BBC that he was unfamiliar with the Frolic, but it was possible that Victorian-era shipwrecks could now be starting to degrade, thus dispensing their cargos into the open sea.
Tusker Rock, known as a “ship graveyard,” is just two miles southeast of Ogmore-by-Sea, so it could very well be the boots’ origin point. This is still just a theory, however.
Beach AcademyExperts have stated that the boots are “clearly Victorian” in design.
While this particular mystery has garnered worldwide attention for its strangeness, it also highlights a much larger issue plaguing beaches in the Vale of Glamorgan.
To date, Beach Academy has removed more than 12,000 items of litter from the beaches. And according to Lamport, the company hasn’t “even started to scratch the surface” of their cleanup efforts.
“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,” Lamport said.
If nothing else, the abundance of boots in Ogmore-by-Sea is indicative of just how much work lies ahead for the volunteers of Beach Academy.
After reading about the mystery of the boots that washed up in Wales, discover the eerie reason why ships of dead bodies keep washing ashore in Japan. Then, learn about the dozens of shoes — with feet still in them — that washed ashore in Vancouver and Seattle.
