Concealed Shoes

Well! You live and learn! Today a fascinating story about a subject of which we had no idea till today. Hiding shoes in buildings, in walls, up chimneys and so on as a lucky charm, historically. It's a well known 'thing' apparently, but had passed us by.

The mighty winds of Sunday night and Monday, we discovered to our horror, had slightly lifted the Tígín roof in presumably a particularly strong gust. All these old buildings are not particularly well put together and the roof of this one must be a good 30-40 years old so that the timbers are quite rotten and the tin fairly rusty. The concrete and stone walls are solid enough to the top (gutter height) but the roof is then put on, seemingly without it being fixed down. The angle under the lower ends of each strip of corrugated, seems to be loosely filled with rubble before loose concrete is thrown into the gap from inside the building presumably to try to hold the loose rubble together and maybe 'glue' down the lowest horizontal as some kind of attempted 'wall plate'. The roof is then held down by pouring concrete over the ends of the roof at the gables, first creating a wooden box of shuttering to take the concrete while it sets.

Our winds had lifted the 'wall plate' half way along the wall and a loose stone had rolled into the gap, preventing the roof from falling back into place when the gust finished. We spotted that the corrugated seemed to be well proud of the guttering. The 'repair' was fairly simple, I just had to poke the loose stone back up out of the way and the roof could sag back onto its wall BUT it as in doing this poking, I spotted a small child's boot up among the rubble on top of the wall.

The shoe is 6 and three quarters inches long and 2 and three quarters inches wide and is of obviously 'stout' agricultural construction with several layers of leather, and most of its nails still there but blown and rusty. Fascinated, I winkled it out to show Liz, but we both then had the horrors in case this was some kind of family bereavement / memorial thing and decided not to use this in this blog or to photograph it.

However, Liz then went a-Googling on the internet using "Shoes found in walls" in the search engine and quickly discovered that this is actually a well known and wide spread cultural and building trades thing, to conceal a single child's-size shoe in your building works as a good luck token and there are whole museum databases and sections on which to record your finds. Northampton Museum in the UK and The Irish National Museum both ask for details.

One website at

http://northamptonmuseums.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/concealed-shoes/

had more.

• "People often hid old boots and shoes," they report, "in chimneys and walls to bring good luck to their houses and to ward off evil spirits.

• The shoes are always worn out.

• Very often there is only one shoe.

• Many of the shoes are for children.

• The shoes were often put in place when building work was being done to the house.

• It may be that if the workmen found a shoe they replaced it with a new offering, or put the old shoe back together with a new one?
• No one knows when and how this habit began.
• The earliest shoes we know of were put in place about 1500.
• Shoes seem to have had a special significance.
• A shoe is the only item of clothing which takes on the shape of the person wearing it.
• A single worn shoe was hidden so that a malevolent spirit could not steal it and  take away the protection the shoe gave. 

Today people renovating old buildings sometimes come across ‘concealed shoes’.  The finds are very important because they show us what ordinary people were wearing on their feet hundreds of years ago. 

We keep a concealed shoe index here at the museum

At the moment the index stands at approximately 1,900 entries from all over the U.K and also records concealed shoe finds in North America, Canada, and a number of countries in Europe including France, Spain and Poland".

We will report our shoe to both Museums and have carefully replaced it in the top of the wall.

Interestingly, this is not the first leather item I have found, so I wonder whether this is a more general farm 'thing'. In the chicken house roof I found stashed a leather over-reach boot. These boots are fitted to horses' rear hooves where the horse has a tendency to bring his back foot so far forward in his stride that it can clout his front leg, which can be a problem on shod horses. 

Also, by coincidence, I was walking the dogs today and was greeted by a near-neighbour in a van who I had not met before. He introduced himself (We'll call him Brian the Roofer) and we chatted away a while before he told me that he was a roofer. A ha! said I and told him my story of the poor construction, rotten timbers, loose rubble and roof trying to get airborne. I invited him to drop by in passing and take a look and give me a quote on replacing the rooves of both the Tígín and the chicken house, which we will surely need to do at some stage, all be it hopefully not THAT soon!