World's Oldest Shower Shoes Found at Hadrian's Wall

Archaeologists have discovered thousands of preserved shoes at Vindolanda, an ancient Roman fort along Hadrian's Wall. But this one is quite possibly the world's oldest example of a shower shoe.

Credit: The Vindolanda Trust

The 'bath clog' - which consists of a wooden platform sole and a leather upper - was a forerunner of the kind of slip-on shoe we wear in locker room showers for sanitary reasons. But the Romans wore the platform clogs - which they called 'sculponeae' - to protect themselves from the hot, slippery floors of the bath house.

Roman bath houses were communal gathering places, according to English Heritage, a historic trust that conserves artifacts and heritage sites. A bather would undress then move from a cold room to a warm room to a hot room, then back to the first room for a cold plunge. One of the most important inventions in Roman bathing was the hypocaust system, reports Live Science, which involved stoking a furnace underneath a raised floor to heat the warm and hot rooms and their baths. This radiant heat system also made the floor incredibly hot to the touch.

Hadrian's Wall is a former 73 mile defensive fortification of the Roman province of Britannia, begun in AD 122 in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian, and designed to protect Britannia from the marauding Picts to the north. At its peak, an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Roman soldiers were stationed along the wall and, despite being Rome's most northerly outpost, legionnaires billeted to this chilly region in northern England still had the remarkable luxury of bath houses.

This bath clog from Vindolanda can be seen from now until September 2027 at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto as part of their Unearthing Vindolanda exhibit.