The Shoe Tree

Until yesterday I had no idea Hornington had a Shoe Tree. It's not much of one, to be fair - it doesn't have a great many shoes - but it seems to have been photographed as long ago as 2017 so how I can have missed it given the number of times I must have gone past it I can't imagine. 

The redoubtable Ms Trollsmiter asked me what on earth Shoe Trees are about, but this absolutely reasonable question is impossible to answer neatly. There are masses of Shoe Trees across the world (here's a list of US ones) and new examples appear all the time; this folklore-and-magic blogger reports on a recent one in Scotland. There is no single reason why people start tossing shoes in trees and other people choose to imitate them, and the reason why the first event happens may not be why it's followed by more. The Hornington tree is near the skate park, as is the one in Basingstoke which began last year, and this one in Soham, so there might be some local significance to that, but popular theories that shoe trees mark rendezvous points for drug sales, gang territory boundaries, or that popular folkloric staple, 'fertility rituals', seem to be mythical. As this US-based writer points out, it's unclear what 'slinging shoes into a tree has to do with sex'.

When I worked in High Wycombe there was a famous Shoe Tree along the main road leading west from Stokenchurch. Here it is, as I photographed it in 2000: 

The tree was right beside a busy main road and very hard to get a clear look at, let alone throw anything in. Several people assured me gypsies were responsible for it, but again nobody could explain what they might have got out of the act of lobbing a shoe, or a pair of shoes, up a tree: gypsies are of course mysterious and secretive figures so you can safely pin any mystery on them. This tree has existed since the 1970s and has moved about: the one I photographed fell a little while later (I have another photo of it somewhere in its recumbent state) and now there's a successor. There has been some outrage that £265,000 was supposedly awarded by a National Lottery grant to 'get to the bottom of the mystery', but this is based on a misunderstood report in the Daily Mail: the grant was actually given to the Chilterns Woodlands Project in 2005 to research, preserve and publicise 'special trees' across the whole Chilterns region, not just this one. 

Ultimately, I suspect, while the specific reasons why some Shoe Trees begin varies from place to place, they carry on because they're fun - a way of leaving your mark on a place. You will carry on knowing your old footwear is there, even if nobody else knows it's yours. As Hunter Stuart sums up a little deflatingly, 'shoe trees exist because people enjoy throwing their shoes into trees' ... !