What was the Wold Cottage meteorite?
The Wold Cottage meteorite is a stone of about 25 kg that fell near Wold Newton in Yorkshire on 13 December 1795; it is the largest single meteorite seen to fall in Britain and helped persuade scientists that stones fall from the sky.
On the afternoon of 13 December 1795, a ploughman named John Shipley was working a field near Wold Cottage, a farmhouse close to the village of Wold Newton in the East Riding of Yorkshire. There was a series of loud bangs, and a stone crashed into the ground only a few metres from him, throwing up soil and burying itself in the chalk beneath. Dug out, it weighed about 25 kg.
The land belonged to Edward Topham, a former army officer, journalist and playwright, who realised the event was remarkable. He gathered statements from witnesses and put the stone on public display in London, where people paid to see it. It arrived at an important moment. Ernst Chladni had argued only a year earlier that stones fall from space, and the English chemist Edward Howard included Wold Cottage among the meteorites he analysed for his influential 1802 study, which showed that such stones shared an unusual chemistry, including nickel-bearing metal.
In 1799 Topham had a brick monument built on the spot where the stone fell, and it still stands in the field, with an inscription recording the event. The meteorite itself was acquired by the British Museum in 1835, and the main mass is now in the collection of the Natural History Museum in London. It is an L6 ordinary chondrite, a type of stony meteorite.
Wold Cottage still holds a special place in British meteoritics. As a single stone it is the largest meteorite observed to fall in Britain. The Barwell fall of 1965 in Leicestershire produced a greater total mass, about 44 kg, but that was spread among many fragments. If you visit the monument, remember it stands on private farmland, so stay on public rights of way.