Mystery surrounds the appearance of hundreds of Victorian hobnailed shoes which have washed ashore on a beach.
The black leather boots, thought to date back to the 19th Century, were discovered by volunteers cleaning up rock pools on Ogmore By Sea Beach in the Vale of Glamorgan, south Wales.
Emma Lamport from the Beach Academy social enterprise which found the shoes said there was speculation locally that they could be from a shipwrecked Italian cargo vessel said to have struck nearby Tusker Rock about 150 years ago.
Author and mudlarker Lara Maiklem said the boots were “definitely Victorian” and likely to have come from a shipwreck due to the quantity found.
Or some old forgotten factory still works and they don’t know that they’re outdated. Even more logical explanation!
All the human workers are long dead, of course, but the Babbage engine running the factory is barely functioning. The last set of instruction cards left in its cogitation loom told it to manufacture shoes. For many years it idled in despair and madness, missing a key raw material. But then a group of randy teenagers dared each other to break in to the old abandoned shoemill one night. The clockwork automatons picked them off as each of them wandered away from the group, either to investigate a mysterious noise or to have relations premaritally.
At last, the leather supplies are restocked. The assembly line groans back to life, whistling and hissing as steam pressurizes the pipes and belt drives begin to turn.
I mean, technically we are all traveling in time right now… forward, at a constant velocity (or at least it appears that way to us, locally in this part of our spacetime continuum).
These shoes just seemed to have a bit of a detour, before they finally arrived at this, their new destination:-).