Largest Roman shoe ever found to go on display

The largest Roman shoe ever discovered, found in 2025 at the ancient fort of Magna on Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, will be going on display at the Vindolanda Trust’s Roman Army Museum in Brampton, Cumbria. It will be joined by some of the other large footwear unearthed at Magna Roman Fort at a new exhibition opening February 7th.

Magna was a smaller fort about seven miles west of the major fort of Vindolanda just south of Hadrian’s Wall. Unlike Vindolanda, which has been excavated regularly for decades, Magna has only been archaeologically excavated since 2023. Last summer’s excavation uncovered 34 shoes in a variety of sizes from children’s to adults. Eight of them were much bigger than average size, starting at 11.8 inches long. The largest of them was 12.8 inches long, the equivalent of a US men’s size 14. Michael Jordan wears a size 13.5, just to give you an idea of how huge these shoes are.

It’s a statistically significant proportion of shoes of unusual size. Almost 24% of the shoes discovered so far at Magna are extra large. Meanwhile, of the 5,000 shoes unearthed over 55 years of excavations at Vindolanda, only four or five of them are in the extra large category.

[Archaeologist Rachel Frame] said that while it was clear the leather shoes belonged to tall people, the mystery over why the individuals were stationed at the fort remained.

“We know that certain parts of the Roman world would have specialist regiments recruited into the army because they have a particular skillset – whether that’s in horse riding or archery,” she said.

“So potentially we’ve got a more specialist unit at the site [for whom] it was advantageous to be taller,” she said.

Archaeologists hope that when excavations resume in April, artifacts are unearthed that may explain this intriguing clodhopper cluster. For example, if altars dedicated to deities, funerary reliefs and inscriptions emerge that identify the legions stationed at the fort, it could clarify why they may have been recruited for above-average height.

* This article was originally published here