“Unusually large” 2,000-year-old shoes unearthed at a Roman site in northern England

A stash of “unusually large” 2,000-year-old shoes dug up at a Roman site in northern England has left archaeologists searching for an explanation, they told AFP on Thursday.

Eight large shoes, including one measuring nearly 13 inches long – equivalent to size 49 in Europe and size 15 in the US – have been found by archaeologists from the Vindolanda Charity Trust in recent months.

“Eight shoes from Magna are now recorded as 30cm or over in length and this includes one which holds the current record for being the Trust’s largest shoe at 32.6cm long,” the Roman Army Museum and Fort said in a news release.

The trust was established in 1970 to excavate, conserve, and share Roman remains at Vindolanda and Carvoran, both part of the Hadrian’s Wall World Heritage Site in northern England.

The shoes were discovered in a defensive ditch, often used by Romans as a rubbish dump, at the Magna Roman Fort in Northumberland.

Only a tiny fraction of shoes in Vindolanda’s vast existing collection are of a similar size, whereas around a quarter of those from the Magna site are in this size range, according to Rachel Frame, a senior archaeologist on the project.

She called it “really unusual.”

“We’re all now off trying to work out who might have been here,” Frame told AFP.

She added they were eager to know “which regiments would have been stationed in Magda” and why exactly there are “so many large shoes at this site compared to others.”

The team reported finding the first “exceptionally large shoe” on May 21 and has continued to discover more since then, according to Vindolanda’s website.

“You need specific soil conditions with very low oxygen for organic objects made of things like wood, leather, textiles, stuff like that, to survive for this length of time,” explained Frame.

She noted the team are probing the history of the Roman Empire for answers, stressing people of different cultures and backgrounds would likely have been meeting at the site.

“When people think about the Romans, they think about Italians, they sometimes forget just how broad the Empire was and how far it stretched,” Frame said.

A video released by the trust shows the vast array of footwear unearthed at the site. The video features Dr. Elizabeth Greene, associate professor at the University of Western Ontario, who has seen and measured every shoe in the Vindolanda collection.

“I think there is something very different going on here at Magna, even from this small sample uncovered it is clear that these shoes are much larger on average than most of the Vindolanda collection,” Greene said.

In a separate social media post on Thursday, the trust said archaeologists had also uncovered another ancient artifact — a boxwood comb.

“Magna is making the news this week with all our giant shoes but they are not the only artefacts in the fort ditches,” the post reads. “This morning a lovely boxwood comb was uncovered.”