Wold Cottage is an ordinary (L6) chondrite that fell in the East Riding of Yorkshire, United Kingdom, December 13th of 1795.
This meteorite fell at a time when the occurence of rocks falling from the sky was still the subect of heated debate. In fact, though the Wold Cottage meteorite fall was witnessed by several people, and even fell on land owned by a well-known newspaper proprietor and major who collected the witnesses’ sworn testimonies, some skeptics persisted in their disbelief for years after the fall.
The landowner, however, highly publicized the fall at Wold Cottage, erecting a monument at the location of the fall and exhibiting the stone in Picadilly, where he charged a shilling to view the meteorite (Burke, 1986).
The publicity surrounding Wold Cottage, as well as its scientific study along with that of other recovered meteorites by leading researchers of the day, lent weight to the emerging view that rocks could and did fall from the sky (Pillinger & Pillinger, 1996). Sources that were intially suggested for meteorites included the ejection of stones from lunar volcanoes, and the formation of rocks in Earth’s atmosphere.
Although postulated before the Wold Cottage fall, the cosmic origin of these rocks was not accepted until much later, after the discovery of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter in the early 1800s, and the falls of the L’Aigle meteorite in 1803 and the Weston meteorite in 1807.
Further reading:
Pillinger, C.T. and Pillinger, J.M. 1996. The Wold Cottage meteorite: Not just any ordinary chondrite. Meteoritics & Planetary Science. 31, 589-605.
Burke, J.G. 1986. Cosmic Debris: Meteorites in History. University of California Press, Berkeley, California. 441pp.
