As last year, just click on the image to the left to be taken to the A-Z website and links to other blogs taking part. Good luck to everyone and I hope the inspiration keeps flowing.
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F is for Feet
Apologies to people who are appalled by feet and for those who are looking at the beads and thinking “oooh cool”, click on the picture and you’ll go to the site. But please read the post first, ‘kay?
I’m not here to try and sell you foot necklaces, or whatever they are. I’m here to tell you that both the young women in the picture are of Anglo-Saxon, Jutish, Danish extraction rather than Scottish, Irish or Welsh.
How do I know this?
It’s the shape of their feet.
During WW2 a chiropodist called Phyllis Jackson noticed that a lot of her customers with foot problems were servicemen of celtic extraction. Their little toes were being squashed by their service issued footwear and their heels were pinched and blistered. It didn’t take her long to realise that the fault lay with their footwear rather than with their feet. The standard British ‘army boot’, used by the other armed services as well, is made to a specific average shape that conforms well to the usual shape of feet in England but out on the Celtic fringes feet are shaped differently. Over the next 40 years Phyllis studied these differences, especially the differences at skeletal level, by attending archaeological digs and photographing and measuring skeletal remains. She published a paper about it in 2007 and her findings are being used to determine the percentage of Romano-British and Saxon bodies in 5th, 6th and 7th century cemeteries as a means of plotting the Saxon invasion.
So take your socks off and look at your feet. If you have a long big toe, a considerable taper towards the little toe, a broad ball of the foot and a narrower heel you might have Saxon feet. If your feet are more rectangular and there is less difference in length of your toes then you might have a drop of Irish, Scottish or Welsh blood.
Are YOU brave enough to ask this lot to take their socks off?
Elin Gregory 
What a great post. I never thought why I have such dreadful feet. I have such mixed ancestry it is unreal. That will be why.
Bringing up this subject in conversation is a sure fire way to get everyone to take their socks off – if you’re into that kind of thing. đ Glad you were amused.
Hmmm. I was. I don’t know I’d take my socks off though. I wouldn’t want anyone dying of shock.
Shared this over on my Kilting the book facebook page. Hope you don’t mind x
Not t all đ I’m imagining people world wide eyeing their toes. đ
oh abso x
hmmm…I’ve got a spot of Saxon in my feet. Just a spot. I’ll go back to imagining taking off the socks of those Scotsmen đ
How about width at the base of the toes versus the heel? My mother actually put a note in my baby book hoping that my very triangular feet wouldn’t give me as much trouble as they did my father. (They have, though.)
Very interesting. I would think I have the Irish, Scottish drop then.
how funny! interesting to find out a little heritage from our feet!
and pretty barefoot sandals!
happy f day!