Has a meteorite ever been seen to fall in the UK?
Yes. Britain has a couple of dozen recorded falls, including Wold Cottage in Yorkshire in 1795, Barwell in Leicestershire in 1965, Glatton in Cambridgeshire in 1991 and Winchcombe in Gloucestershire in 2021.
The British Isles have a small but remarkable record of witnessed falls, stretching back to the 1600s. Some of them helped shape the science of meteorites itself.
The most historically important is Wold Cottage, which fell near Wold Newton in Yorkshire on 13 December 1795. A stone of about 25 kg landed near a farm labourer and buried itself in the ground. Its landowner, Edward Topham, put up a monument at the spot, and the stone helped persuade sceptical scientists that rocks really can fall from the sky. It is now in the Natural History Museum in London.
On Christmas Eve 1965, the Barwell fall showered stones over a Leicestershire village. The largest meteorite fall recorded in Britain, it produced roughly 46 kg of an ordinary chondrite in many pieces; one small fragment was reportedly found inside a vase. In 1949 a stone crashed through the roof of a hotel in Beddgelert in Snowdonia, Wales. In 1991, a small stone of under a kilogram landed in a garden in Glatton, Cambridgeshire.
Then, on 28 February 2021, came Winchcombe: a rare carbonaceous chondrite filmed by many cameras across Britain, with pieces found on a driveway in Gloucestershire the next morning. It was the first recovered UK fall for 30 years. Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland have their own falls too. Considering how small and cloudy Britain is, that is quite a tally. Yet the wet climate and green countryside make old meteorites hard to find, so almost all British meteorites are witnessed falls. The next one could come at any time, which is why camera networks keep watch every clear night.