Howardites
Meteorites of Britain and Ireland · England

The Wiltshire meteorite

Britain's heaviest meteorite: a weathered 93-kilogram stone that sat in a country house garden for generations.

Key facts

Found
Date not known
Where
Lake House, Wiltshire, probably from Salisbury Plain
Type
H5 ordinary chondrite
Mass
about 93 kg
Where it is kept
Research collections in England
Nation today
England

In the early 1990s a large, heavily weathered stone was brought to meteorite scientists by a man who called it his grandfather's stone. It was a meteorite, and at about 93 kilograms it is the heaviest ever found in Britain, nearly four times the weight of Wold Cottage. Nobody knew where it had come from, so it was named simply Wiltshire, after the county where it had been kept.

The planetary scientist Colin Pillinger and his wife Judith later traced its history through archives and old photographs of Lake House, a country house in the Avon valley near Salisbury. They concluded that it had been there for a very long time, had not been brought from abroad, and had probably been collected on Salisbury Plain in the 19th century, when antiquarians were digging into the area's prehistoric burial mounds. One idea is that it was dug out of a barrow, but that cannot be proved.

Wiltshire is an H5 ordinary chondrite. Its deep weathering shows it lay on or in the ground for a very long time, possibly tens of thousands of years, before anyone picked it up. It was shown to the public at an exhibition in London in 2012.

Did you know?

Did you know?

At about 93 kilograms, Wiltshire is the heaviest meteorite known from Britain.

Did you know?

It may have been dug out of a prehistoric burial mound near Stonehenge, though nobody can be sure.

Find out more

Nearest other British and Irish meteorites