Tall tales and true: of Yorkshire moors and the byways of Surrey: Tales that Wold villages tell

We have visited so many Wold villages now, we are starting to recognise their special features: especially the delightful ponds at their heart.

A couple of days ago we picnicked on the village green just opposite The Green Dragon in Welton, a pub famed for being the spot where Dick Turpin supposedly jumped through a window attempting to avoid arrest for stealing a foal, among other misdeeds, prior to his conviction and hanging at the Tyburn Gallows in York, which is just a hop, step and jump away, so poor Dick could not have evaded the law too long after that. The gallows took him before the small pox did, it seems.

The village and the green are much quieter these days. There are even a couple of delightful cottages built right onto the green. Here we chatted with a local livery rider who dismounted outside the pub for a cool drink while we fed apples to her super sturdy cob as he relaxed under the trees until spooked by the village ducks coming up from the pond.

Later we called in at Skidby Mill, one of the last working mills in Yorkshire, that has been in operation in the village since 1821. Many of its original outbuildings have survived, too, and have been turned into an operational forge, a tea room and a museum displaying rural life artifacts, which was closed today, but had some great graphic drawings of implements it had stored, some of which had us guessing their function before we read their relevant screed.

And today we visited Wold Newton, with a charming pond at its heart, where we chatted with local villagers who told us about a 25kg meteorite that landed here on a hill one rainy afternoon in 1795. The site is private, but they gave us directions on how to get to it, where to walk, and from whom to get permission. So, down the village lane we went, scouting out the terrain and the access.

The day in 1795 was wet, it was 13 December so it was cold as well as damp, and John Shipley, a ploughman and shepherd for the village magistrate, Major Edward Topham, who owned Wold Newton Cottage, happened to be out in the back fields doing his job of work in this miserable weather when he and others around heard the whoosh! of something coming at them from the skies. John felt clods of soil hit him as the earth briefly shook. When all was quiet, he and the others went to explore. They found a great round rock, later determined to be a meteorite, still smoking, embedded below the topsoil, deep into the chalk rock strata, making an indentation of about a metre radius, all up. We were surprised it was not more. This was only the second recorded meteorite to have fallen in England at the time, so it enjoyed much publicity and notoriety.

The meteorite is now on display at the Natural History Museum in London. On the site it landed Edward Topham built a tower as a memorial to the event. John Shipley lived and worked another 34 years in Wold Newton and was, interestingly, the first person buried in newly consecrated grounds of All Saints Church at Wold Newton in 1829. This new church was built on the site of an old chapel of ease that had been built on land gifted by William, the Conqueror to his nephew, Gilbert de Grant after 1066. Gilbert built the original chapel of ease in Wold Newton around the turn of the 11th Century. So, with that information at hand, we had to visit that, too. The church is now old. It is terribly musty. The font looks as ancient as the steeple. And the mould meant that none of us could stay inside too long. Old age is just not all it is cracked up to be at times.