by Adele Evershed
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| 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. —BBC, December 24, 2025 |
winter sea
cresting waves
of protest
The dregs of December wash up a cobbler’s lot of footwear—Victorian working boots, bloated with salt and hard labor. They’ve made a pilgrimage to Ogmore-by-Sea, walking on water, to reach the wrinkled sand.
Now they rest in rock pools with winkles and sea snails. Some are as black as Dad’s Boxing Day silence, some as tiny as a mermaid’s purse, some baring hobnails like teeth—leather tongues whispering their names to the slack tide.
They came ashore from a ship snagged on Tusker Rock—a floating cargo of tar-dipped ghosts, leaving out shoes for Christmas treats. If this was a kinder time, St Nick would fill them with gold and a life begun again. Instead, they’ll be gathered in sacks, tossed on the rubbish heap like all the other shoeless souls washed up on our beaches, their names known only to the high tide.
cold front—
a robin’s song
crosses the border
Adele Evershed is a Welsh writer who swapped the Valleys for the American East Coast. Her work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Comstock Review, Modern Haiku, Avalon Literary Review, Black Bough Poetry and The New Verse News. She is the author of Turbulence in Small Spaces (Finishing Line Press) and has a forthcoming poetry collection, In the Belly of the Wail, with Querencia Press. She has published three novellas-in-flash— Wannabe and
