`Friday morning, September 10th, 1813, being very calm and serene, and the sky clear, about nine o'clock, a cloud appeared in the east, and very soon after I heard 11 distinct reports appearing to proceed thence, somewhat resembling the discharge of heavy artillery."
Thus did an eyewitness from Adare, Co Limerick, describe the start of a strange occurrence in his townland. "The sky became darkened and very much disturbed, making a hissing noise, and from thence appeared to issue with great violence different masses of matter, which directed their course with great velocity in a horizontal direction towards the west. One of these fell to the earth, and sank into it more than a foot and a half, on the lands of Scagh, in the neighbourhood of Patrick's Well."
A chunk of debris large enough to survive the journey through the atmosphere and land on Earth is called a mete- orite. Meteorites were recognised by the ancient Greeks as of extra-terrestrial origin, but the concept was lost in later centuries.
Certainly, to the enlightened sceptics of the late 18th and very early 19th centuries, the possibility of stones falling from the heavens was ridiculous. In 1807, when two American academics announced that they had seen a fall of meteorites in Connecticut, President Thomas Jefferson declared that he would "sooner believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that large stones should fall from heaven".
But fall they did. The narrative of the observer from Adare continues: "Six or seven more of the same kind of masses, but smaller, and fractured, as if shattered from each other or from larger ones, descended at the same time with great velocity in different places between Scagh and the village of Adare. One very large mass passed with great rapidity and considerable noise at a small distance from me; it came to the ground on the lands of Brasky, and penetrated a very hard and dry earth about two feet. Its shape was rather round, but quite irregular; it appeared to be fractured in many places, and it weighed about 65lb."
Later, this object achieved some notoriety as "the Limerick Stone", not to be confused with the Treaty Stone for which that city is famous. The former, the Limerick Stone, is housed at the University of Oxford, and still holds the record as the largest meteorite ever to fall upon this island.