HUNDREDS of shoes have washed onto a UK beach 150 years after dozens of people died at the location.
Volunteers cleaning up the 400 leather hobnailed boots have been left scratching their heads as to how the footwear got there.
Workers from Beach Academy – a company dedicated to removing marine litter and reviving natural rockpool environments – were clearing debris from the shore.
Beach Academy founder Emma Lamport said nearly 300 items had been found in one haul at Ogmore by Sea Beach on December 18.
What the team uncovered was more than 400 antique black leather shoes, believed to date from the Victorian era.
The founder added: “The strongest theory is that the shoes come from a shipwreck called the Frolic, that 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.
In another ocean-related mystery, scientists have recently uncovered a vast hidden geological structure deep beneath the island of Bermuda, situated in the heart of the infamous Bermuda Triangle.
By probing deep underground in their research, scientists were able to find a mysterious 12.4-mile thick layer of rock.
Seismologist William Frazer from Carnegie Science explained: “Typically, you have the bottom of the oceanic crust and then it would be expected to be the mantle.
“But in Bermuda, there is this other layer that is emplaced beneath the crust, within the tectonic plate that Bermuda sits on.”
This “underplating” layer, formed from cooled magma creating less dense rock, is believed to provide the buoyancy keeping the island’s surrounding seafloor raised, dating back to Bermuda’s volcanically active period 30-35 million years ago.
Frazer said: “Understanding a place like Bermuda, which is an extreme location, is important to understand places that are less extreme.
“And gives us a sense of what are the more normal processes that happen on Earth and what are the more extreme processes that happen.”
