By this I do not mean an aged Rock Singer, but a football-sized meteorite that landed in a Yorkshire field in 1795, missing a local ploughman by a few feet!

This chunk of stone from outer space began the science of meteorology. The local squire, Major Edward Topham, took the strange lump to his friend in London, Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society. Banks commissioned a chemist and a mineralogist to examine the rock. From their investigation (the stone included a combination of nickel and iron not found on Earth) they realised that sky stones really existed and fell to this planet from space. This fact had previously been ridiculed by the scientific establishment. This early study put an end to the old wives' tale that sky stones were flung from volcanoes in Iceland!

The event is commemorated by a brick obelisk erected on the landing site at Wold Newton. A tablet records that Here, On This Spot, December 13th 1795, fell from the Atmosphere, An Extraordinary Stone! Just goes to show that exciting things were happening at home while the soldiers of many nations were fighting during the Revolutionary Wars! (This item was extracted from The Guardian of 14 December 1995)

Paul Chamberlain