Down to Earth

I have just been reading about the large rock that fell into a muddy field in India, thought to have been a meteorite from outer space. From such a rare event many of those who saw it will have their own story to tell. 

Here is just one such tale from my own corner of the world


It was quite an event, even to command the attention of the known world , when a meteorite fell out of the night sky in 1795 in a remote field just outside the small village of Wold Newton, East Yorkshire.

The planet earth has of course been peppered with the hard, hot fragments of comet debris and obliterated asteroids for millions of years but only in a handful of cases has this been witnessed first hand.

On that day, the 13th December 1795,  an agricultural worker was not only present to see the rock hit the ground but was reported as having been quite close to becoming , perhaps, the first known fatality of a very personal extinction level event.

Shooting stars and bright transient celestial bodies have been well documented in human history being seen as an omen for good or a portent for doom and destruction, principally dependant on how large you own army was compared to your enemy on the far side of the battlefield.

The circumstances for the presence of the farm worker are not documented. It is reasonable to assume that if in daylight he was just going about his business, which in winter may have been digging up the sprouts (not sure when they were actually introduced to England), or other seasonal root vegetables. There are, to my knowledge, no graphic accounts of a biblical crescendo of sound, heat and tremor around the reported sighting. This also tends to support a daylight descent and impact- more of a swoosh and a dull thud than what would equate to the arrival of the horsemen of the apocalypse on a quiet Yorkshire day just before the Christmas festivities. They would stand out in such circumstances.

The soils in the Wolds are full of chalk so an object subsequently measured at 28 Imperial Inches by 36 inches and weighed at 56 pounds will have not left too much of a crater in theory but there are accounts of quite a deep embedding into the bedrock beneath the cultivated top soil. The sample was  retrieved and its local and then national and world fame was assured through the power of the written word from a village resident who happened to be an author and a journalist. In a sleepy hamlet in the late 18th Century this would represent an out of this world opportunity to an ambitious media man, even more than a report on a surprisingly bumper potato crop, further misdemeanours involving the maidservants and Master at Grange Farm and the inflationary forces at play in the price of hiring a pony and trap to get to the market in Driffield or Malton.

That year, towards the end of the century, had been quite unremarkable. There had been floods with some bridges over the River Severn damaged, a Royal Wedding between the Prince of Wales and Caroline of Brunswick, military involvement in the east, riots over bread shortages in many English towns and the passing of the Seditious Meetings Act which allowed martial action wherever 50 or more people were inclined to have a seditious meeting. There are some very strong parallels indeed between then and  now.

Against this background of not much really going on the meteorite reached the front pages of the National daily papers. It did the rounds and in 1799 a brick monument was erected at the point where the farm worker just about evacuated his bowels one winters day.

The rock was hawked around London for some years on a pay to view basis representing a major export for Wold Newton and the East Yorkshire Wolds .

After much scientific prodding and probing the fragment was presented to the Natural History Museum. It maintains its status as one of the largest authenticated bits of a space originated solid known to Man and was the first proof of extra terrestrial objects and their composition

The story has not run out of momentum yet. The current owners of the nearest property to the impact tracked down a piece of the Meteorite and in 2010 it was returned to form a small but significant  artefact in what is now a Bed and Breakfast establishment.

The Science Fiction Writer Philip Farmer, who died in 1990 ,developed his factional Wold Newton Family on the assertion that those who had been exposed to the meteorite in 1795 mutated genetically to possess fantastical powers and intelligence. Their family trees later spawned the likes of the Scarlet Pimpernel, Allan Quatermain, Tarzan, Fu Manchu and James Bond. The local micro brewery has immortalised the event with a brew called Falling Stone.

I like to imagine that the Georgian farmworker James Shipley at the very least dined out on his experience for the rest of his life , but sadly was  never be able to appreciate his own superhero status.