Howardites
Meteorites of Britain and Ireland · England

The Rowton meteorite

The only iron meteorite ever seen to fall in Britain, dug from a Shropshire field with a walking stick.

Key facts

Fell
20 April 1876
Where
Rowton, near Wellington (Telford), Shropshire
Type
IIIAB iron
Mass
about 3.5 kg
Where it is kept
Natural History Museum, London
Nation today
England

At about twenty to four on the afternoon of 20 April 1876, during heavy rain but no thunder, farm workers near Rowton in Shropshire heard a rumble and then a bang like a cannon. The farmer, George Brookes, found a small fresh hole in a field, probed it with his walking stick, and dug out a lump of metal from about 45 centimetres (18 inches) down. It weighed about 3.5 kilograms.

Rowton is an iron meteorite, made almost entirely of iron-nickel metal. It belongs to the IIIAB chemical group, the largest group of irons, which are thought to come from the core of a single asteroid that melted, separated into core and mantle, and was later broken apart. When cut, polished and etched, Rowton shows the criss-cross Widmanstätten pattern that forms only when metal cools extremely slowly, over millions of years.

Irons make up only about one in twenty observed falls worldwide, so it is not surprising that Britain has just one. Rowton was described by the Natural History Museum's Walter Flight in 1882, and it is still in the national collection in London.

Did you know?

Did you know?

Rowton is the only iron meteorite seen to fall in the UK or Ireland.

Did you know?

Its Widmanstätten pattern records cooling of only a few degrees every million years inside an asteroid's core.

Find out more

Nearest other British and Irish meteorites