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High Possil Meteorite
The High Possil meteorite fell on the morning of Thursday, April 5, 1804, in an old quarry near Possil Loch in High Possil, a northern suburb of Glasgow near the border with East Dunbartonshire, and about a mile (1.5 km) southwest of Bishopbriggs.
This was the first meteorite fall to be recorded in Scotland, and one of only four to be found so far.
Unfortunately, with no accurate maps or records made at the time, it is not possible to identify exactly where the pieces fell, and the marker placed on the map below merely indicates the most likely area of the fall. At the time, the area was an old quarry, and since then, has been filled in and the area developed for roads and housing.
Parts of the meteorite remain in Glasgow's Hunterian Museum, while the remainder was distributed to research institutions around the world.
The meteorite was the earliest recorded in Scotland, said to have made a hole in the ground approximately 18 inches deep and 15 inches wide according to the University of Glasgow, who were given the biggest piece of the meteorite by Miss Crawford - the owner of the land at the time.
The meteorite is described as a stony meteorite and very common, classified as an L6 olivine-hypersthene chondrite. Analysis of the elements it contains proves it to be genuine, as many are rare on the Earth. The piece remaining at the Hunterian is referred to as GLAHM M172, the largest surviving piece of the meteorite, weighing approximately 151 g. When found, it was described as being about the size of half a brick, although it had broken into several pieces when it fell. The original weight is thought to have been around 4.5 kg from totalling the parts, but most has been lost, with only about 380 g accounted for in collections.
Sadly, it is said that that the largest piece was just discarded, and is probably still somewhere in the old filled-in quarry.
The others meteorites found in Scotland are:
- The Perth meteorite of 1830
- The Strathmore meteorite, which fell in Perthshire in 1917
- Fragments of a stony meteorite were reported in a field near Glenrothes in 1998, but the fragments were very weathered, meaning the actual fall was much older.
It would appear that the High Possil meteorite of 1804 was one of a number of falls which were witnessed around the start of the 19th century. A number of these were recovered and investigated thoroughly, such as the 1795 World Cottage fall in Yorkshire, and the 1803 L'Aigle fall in France. As such, these may indicate the birth of meteorite science.
Newspaper account of the event
Presumably out of copyright, this quotation from the Herald and Advertiser, Monday, April 30, 1804:
We have been favoured with the following circumstantial account of a Phenomenon in the neighbourhood which is at present the subject of much conversation and Philosophical Enquiry.
"Three men at work in a field at Possil, about three miles north from Glasgow, in the forenoon of Thursday the 5th curt. were alarmed with a singular noise, which continued, they say, for about two minutes, seeming to proceed from the south-east to the north-west. At first, it appeared to resemble four reports from the firing of cannon, afterwards, the sound of a bell, or rather of a gong, with a violently whizzing noise; and lastly they heard a sound, as if some hard body struck, with very great force the surface of the earth."
"On the same day, in the forenoon, six men were at work in the Possil quarry, thirty feet below the surface of the ground, and there too an uncommon noise was heard, which, it is said, seemed at first to proceed from the firing of some cannon; but afterwards, the sound of hard substances hurling downwards over stones, and continuing in whole, for the space of a minute."
"By others who were at the quarry, viz. the overseer of the quarry and a man who was upon a tree, to whom he was giving directions, the noise is described as continuing about two minutes, appearing as if it began in the west, and passed around by the south towards the east; .... as if three or four cannon had been fired off, about the great bridge which conducts the Forth and Clyde canal over the river Kelvin, at the distance of a mile annd a half westward from the quarry; and afterwards, as a violent rushing, whizzing noise.
Along with these last people, there were two boys, one of ten, and the other of four years old, and a dog; the dog, on hearing the noise, ran home, seemingly in a great fright. The overseer, during the continuence of the noise, on looking up to the atmosphere, observed in it a misty commotion, which occasioned in him a considerable alarm, when he called out to the man on the tree, "Come down, I think there is some judgement coming upon us," and says that the man on the tree had scarcely got upon the ground, when something struck with great force, in a drain made for turning off water in the time of, or after rain, about ninety yards distance, splashing mud and water for about twenty feet around. The elder boy, led by the noise to look upto the atmosphere, says that he observed the appearance of smoke in it, with something of a reddish colour moving rapidly through the air, from the west till it fell on the ground. The younger boy, at the instant before the stroke against the earth was heard, called out "Oh such a reek!" and says that he saw an appearance of smoke near the place where the body fell on the ground.
The overseer immediately ran up to the place where the splashing was observed, when he saw a hoel made at the bottom of the drain. In that place a small stream of water, perhaps about a quarter of an inch deep, was running over a gentle declivity, and no spring is near it. The hole was filling with water, and about six inches of it remained still empty. The overseer having made bare his arm, thrust his hand and arm into the hole, which he judges to have been almost perpendicular, the bottom being perhaps a little inclined to the east, and the upper part to the west; at the bottom of the hole, he felt something hard, which he could not move with his hand. The hole was then cleared out, with a shovel and mattock, from an expectation that a cannon ball might be found, but nothing was observed except the natural stratum of soil, and a soft sandy rock upon which it lay, and two pieces of stone that had penetrated a few inches through the rock.
The pieces of stone, he took to be whinstone, and thniks that they were eighteen inches below the bottom of the drain, and that the hole was about fifteen inches in diameter. He was not sensible of any particular heat in the water, or in the pieces of stone, nor of any uncommon smell in the latter, although he applied them to his nostrils. He says that the one piece of stone was about two inches long; that the other piece was about six inches long, four inches broad, and four inches thick, blunted at the edges and end; that the fractures of these pieces exactly coincided; that he does not know whether the fracture was caused by the violence of the fall, or by the mattock; and that he never saw any such stone about the quarry."
"Some days later, when the particulars which have been narrated, became known; a careful search was made for these pieces of stone, which had been disregarded, and the first mentioned piece was soon found; but the largest piece having been used as a block in the quarry, and having fallen among rubbish could not be discovered. Some days after, a fragment of it was detected. The two fragments recovered make the two extremes of the stone: on the surface, they are pretty smooth, and of a black colour; but internally they have a greyish appearance. The intermediate part larger than both seems, as yet, to be lost."
"At the village of High Possil which is within a quarter of a mile of the place where the stone fell, the noise gave much alarm to those who were in the open air; and there, it seems, they thought that the sound proceeded from south east to north-west, agreeably to the report of the three men first mentioned."
"Two men at work within a hundred yards of the house of Possil were alarmed by the noise; they thought it over their heads, and that it resembled the report of a cannon, six times repeated, at equal intervals, with a confused uncommon sound of ten minutes duration; the noise seemd to begin in the north, and to turn round by the west, south and east, to the north."
"The 5th curt. was cold and cloudy; a little more cloudy in the north-east than in the other quarters." "It would gratify many who have heard the above circumstances, to learn through the Glasgow Newspapers, whether any remarkable noise was observed in the neighbouring parts of the country, on the forenoon of the 5th curt. that had any resemblance to what was remarked near Possil"
April 30th 1804.
The pieces
The two parts of the meteorite were kept by Robert Crawford, owner of the land on which the meteorite fell kept the two surviving part. Together with professors from Glasgow University, they pieced together an account of the event, which is probably how the newspaper article came to be written.
On Crawford's death, the pieces passed to his sister, and in 1810 she presented them to the Hunterian Museum.⚠ [^The High Possil Meteorite: from Outer Space to Northern Glasgow in 1804 Retrieved April 22, 2013.^]
Monument
On May 20, 2005, a monument to the event was unveiled near the spot where the meteorite fell.
Regrettably, weeks after emailing, no reply was received to a request to use the image of the stone, which we have used and credited to the source, as we feel it should be further publicised. There appear to be no other images available, and we do not know exactly where it lies.⚠ [^Images of the High Possil Meteorite Monument Opening Ceremony: 11am, 20th May 2005 Retrieved April 29, 2013.^]
2018 retelling of the tale
Five years after we spotted a short article online, telling of the High Possil meteorite.⚠ [^The time Glasgow was struck by a meteorite Retrieved August 23, 2018.^]
References
- Bevan AWR, Hutchison R, Easton AJ, Durant GP, and Farrow CM. High Possil and Strathmore - a study of two L6 chondrites. Meteoritics, Vol 20, pp 491-501. 1985.
⚠ [^#^]
External links
- Nearby Canmore or ScotlandsPlaces items
Aerial views
- Old OS maps
- Nearby geocaches
- Bing Maps
- OS Get-a-map™
- Fly to in Google Earth
- SABRE - Maps (has many options) WiP - Needs lat/lon edit!
- Flash Earth
- EarthTools - disabled
- Coming
Map
⚠ (:gma-point lat=55.8956251 lon=-4.2635643 text='Area of High Possil Meteorite':)
⚠ (:gma-map view=hybrid zoom=14:)
⚠ [[!First]]
⚠ [[!Memorial]]
⚠ (:WPCategoriesList:)
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