The Glatton meteorite
A stone that fell into a hedge while a man was working in his vegetable garden.
Key facts
- Fell
- 5 May 1991
- Where
- Glatton, near Peterborough, Cambridgeshire
- Type
- L6 ordinary chondrite
- Mass
- 767 g
- Where it is kept
- Natural History Museum, London
- Nation today
- England
Around midday on 5 May 1991, a man working in his garden in the village of Glatton in Cambridgeshire heard a whining noise and saw something land in the hedge a few metres away. He found a stone of 767 grams, with a fresh black fusion crust.
Glatton is an L6 ordinary chondrite. Measurements of aluminium-26, a radioactive isotope made by cosmic rays while a meteoroid travels through space, suggest it was exposed in space for more than two million years after breaking from a larger body.
Volunteers searched the area but found no other pieces. Glatton was the last meteorite recovered in the UK for 30 years, until Winchcombe in 2021.
Did you know?
The gap between Glatton in 1991 and Winchcombe in 2021 was 30 years.
Cosmic rays act as a clock: the longer a stone drifts in space, the more of certain isotopes it builds up.
Find out more
- Glatton in the catalogue: the official class and recorded mass
- L chondrites: what this kind of meteorite is and where it comes from
- All the meteorites of Britain and Ireland, with a map
- Found something in the UK or Ireland? What to do next