In February 1859 Mountain Ash was a young, fast growing colliery town in the Cynon valley. What happened there that month has been argued over ever since.
According to accounts collected by Charles Fort, it rained fish. The Rev. John Griffith, Vicar of Aberdare, wrote to the Zoologist that fish had fallen, chiefly on and around the premises of a Mr Nixon of Mountain Ash. In a letter to The Times of 10 March 1859 he added that "the roofs of some houses were covered with them", and that the largest were about five inches long and did not survive the fall. Another letter in The Times, of 2 March, from the curate Aaron Roberts, reported that some people had put the fish in salt water, thinking them sea fish, and that they died almost at once, while those put in fresh water thrived. The Annual Register said they came down "by pailfuls".
The strangest detail was the shape of the fall. The fish came down on a narrow strip of ground about 80 yards long and 12 yards wide, and ten minutes later a second fall landed on the same strip. Fort used this to argue against the usual explanation, a waterspout or whirlwind, which he said would scatter its load.
The fish were not left to rot. Some were sent alive to London and shown at the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park, where the editor of the Zoologist identified one as a minnow and the rest as sticklebacks. Dr Gray of the British Museum was scornful: he thought it "most probably only a practical joke", one of Mr Nixon's workmen having thrown a pail of brook water over another. A later correspondent, apologising for opposing so high an authority, pointed out that he had obtained fish from people who lived some distance apart.
Fort gives the date as 11 February 1859; a local forum post has it as 1843. The Mountain Ash fall remains a favourite of writers on unexplained phenomena, and a small freshwater fish lifted by a storm is still the most likely answer.
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