Wold Cottage

England's largest single meteorite landed beside a Yorkshire ploughman in 1795 – and helped prove that stones fall from the sky.

Key facts

Type

Ordinary chondrite (L6)

Fell or found

Fell (witnessed)

Year

1795 (13 December)

Country

United Kingdom (England)

Mass

about 25 kg

Official name

Wold Cottage

On the afternoon of 13 December 1795, a farm worker named John Shipley was busy in a field near Wold Cottage, a farmhouse close to the village of Wold Newton in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Suddenly there were loud bangs overhead, and a large stone plunged into the ground only a few metres away, spraying him with earth. The stone had buried itself deeply in the chalky soil and had to be dug out. It weighed about 25 kilograms.

It remains the largest single meteorite ever seen to fall in Britain.

Topham's stone

The land belonged to Edward Topham, a well-known writer, journalist and former soldier. Topham gathered statements from the witnesses and took the stone to London, where he exhibited it to paying visitors. He also published the witnesses' accounts, which helped show that several independent people had seen or heard the stone arrive. The display attracted great curiosity, but many educated people remained sceptical. At the time, most natural philosophers believed that stones could not possibly fall from the sky, and some suggested that the Wold Cottage stone must have been an ordinary rock struck by lightning.

In 1799 Topham built a brick monument in the field to mark the spot where the stone had landed. Its inscription records the date of the fall. The monument still stands today on private farmland.

The stone itself was later sold to the naturalist James Sowerby, and it eventually passed to the British Museum. It is now in the collection of the Natural History Museum in London, where it is one of the treasures of the national meteorite collection, and small samples have since been examined with modern instruments that its first investigators could never have imagined.

Howard's breakthrough

Wold Cottage played a key role in one of the founding studies of meteorite science. In 1802 the chemist Edward Charles Howard, working with the French mineralogist Jacques-Louis de Bournon, analysed it alongside stones from other reported falls, including one from Benares in India. They found that the stones shared the same unusual features: tiny round grains, now called chondrules, and specks of metallic iron containing nickel. Ordinary rocks on Earth's surface did not contain metal like that. Howard concluded that these stones had a common, unusual origin.

His paper, presented to the Royal Society, helped persuade the scientific world that stones really do fall from the sky. The following year the shower at L'Aigle in France settled the matter. In recognition of his work, a class of meteorites was later named in his honour: the howardites, rocky meteorites thought to come from the asteroid Vesta.

What it is

Wold Cottage is an L6 ordinary chondrite. Ordinary chondrites are the most common kind of meteorite to fall. 'L' means it belongs to the group with low total iron, and '6' means it was heated strongly inside its parent asteroid so that its chondrules are partly blurred and recrystallised. Like any fresh meteorite, it had a thin, dark fusion crust formed by melting during its fiery flight.

Why it matters

Wold Cottage is one of the meteorites that helped turn an old folk belief into a recognised science. It combines a well-witnessed fall, a careful landowner who recorded what happened, and a key place in the first chemical studies of meteorites. It also reminds us of a principle that still applies today: a meteorite found in Britain normally belongs to the owner of the land where it falls, so permission should always come first.

If you ever travel near Wold Newton, the monument is a reminder that history-changing science can begin in a quiet farmer's field.

Did you know?

See more

Wold Cottage in the catalogue