Horse shoes? Tied on not nailed?

[mcbishop]

I have been right the way through the collections of the Hadrian's Wall Museums (Housesteads, Corbridge, and the Clayton Collection, which is mainly Chesters) and they are conspicuous by their rarity.

So is there actually an example of a Roman nailed horseshoe? (I note that Fraser, quoted above, gives no proof of his sweeping statement.)

I was hedging my bets :-) ) I have never excavated a stratified example of one nor found one in any collections that was indisputably Roman. Problem is, when one was found on a Roman site in days of yore, if it was rusty enough it was very easy to interpret it as Roman. They may indeed have been used (just as lorica segmentata may have been used by auxiliaries) but I have never seen any evidence that proves this was the case. Evidence is key in such matters.

Mike Bishop