In a bizarre reminder of the vagaries of international trade, hundreds of Victorian hobnailed shoes have washed ashore on a beach in Wales, U.K., reports BBC News.

The black leather boots, discovered by volunteers cleaning up rock pools on Ogmore By Sea Beach in the Vale of Glamorgan, south Wales, are thought to date back to the 19th Century. They are probably from a shipwrecked Italian cargo vessel said to have struck nearby Tusker Rock about 150 years ago.

Emma Lamport from the Beach Academy social enterprise, which found the shoes while clearing litter out of rock pools in the area, said one theory was that the Italian ship sank with a cargo of leather shoes and these were washed up the River Ogmore. They ended up embedded in the river banks "and every now and again they are released," she told the BBC.

Shipwrecks remain a feature of ocean-borne international trade, often producing strange flotsam in unexpected places. Earlier in December, people on the south coast of England found bunches of bananas from containers that fell off the back of a ship and washed up on beaches, reports the Guardian.

Maritime casualties have been rising, with certification and risk management company DNV reporting in June 2025 that maritime casualty incidents increased by 42% between 2018 and 2024, while during the same period the global fleet grew by just 10%. The increase was caused mainly by an ageing fleet, and machine damage and failure, causing faults, groundings, and fire-related incidents.