We bought this pair of Miner’s Boots to add a little variety to our collection of mountaineering and climbing boots as it’s always interesting to see how different footwear evolves for different purposes. There appears to be a huge variety of boots worn by miners from different pits, and countries. Early miners would use whatever they had, steel toe-caps came in for safety, there were high ankle versions and ones looking more like wellingtons, no doubt because it can be wet at the coal face.

The ones we have here in the collection are the ‘standard’ 19th century boots, looking rather like clogs, they arrived in a poor state so we cleaned them up & cooked them in leather preservative – ready for the next stint at the coal face!