Brogue is one of only a handful of words which have been borrowed from Irish into English, the underlying Irish word here being bróg ‘a shoe’.

The English word brogue refers specifically to a shoe with decorative perforations, a style often said to be based on a particular type of Irish shoe which had small holes to allow water to drain through when the wearer was crossing boggy land. The Modern Irish word bróg, on the other hand, can be adapted to refer to footwear of any kind, so we have bróga peile ‘football boots’ and bróga trá ‘beach shoes’.

Several examples of shoes worn in medieval Ireland have been found. These shoes are made from the hides of cows, goats and sheep. The earliest example is a simple, soft and flexible covering for the foot known as a cúarán, from the word cúar ‘curved’. A well-preserved cúarán can be seen in the National Museum of Ireland. It consists of a single piece of hide which was gathered together and tied with a narrow strip of leather.

Medieval Irish stories mention also types of footwear called máeláin and máelassa, which are said to have been made of metal. The Ulster hero Fergus mac Róich returns from the dead in a pair of bronze shoes of this kind. That metal footwear, although obviously impractical, was not merely the stuff of fantasy is confirmed by a mid-nineteenth-century find of more than two dozen bronze shoes near the Giant’s Causeway in Co. Antrim.