Harold Platt was delighted when he sold a bit of a meteorite which fell on Barwell, Leicestershire, in 1965. Villager, Mr. Platt, received £39.50p from what was then Leicester Museum for his fragment of Britain’s largest meteorite. It was enough to pay for his summer holiday. Now, though, slivers of the Barwell meteorite have become much more valuable. At auctioneers Lyon and Turnbull in Edinburgh on August 18^th., a fragment weighing 910 grams - roughly 2lb - is expected to fetch between £8,000 and £12,000.

The chunk of space rock is part of an extraordinary collection of space memorabilia - 170 items including bits of the Moon and Mars - set to fetch between £200,000 and £300,000. It has been put up for sale by Fife collector and dealer Rob Elliott, 49. Kevin Yates, who works for the National Space Centre, in Leicester, and runs the Government’s near-Earth objects information centre - which keeps an eye on threats from outer space, said: “meteorite fragments were so valuable because they were so rare.”

ABOVE: An Unwelcome Christmas Present! - Mr. & Mrs. Grewcock , from The Common, in Barwell, inspect the damage caused by the meteorite on Christmas Eve, 1965. (Source: The Herald & Journal, 2009).