From Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor in Cornwall and Devon’s Dartmoor to the Highlands of Scotland, big cats hailing from Africa, Asia and the Americas have been regularly spotted in Great Britain over the past half century, says James Fair.
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But despite numerous sightings, precious little real evidence – a photo or video, for example, or a dead animal – has emerged in that time. And while many experts question whether this is anything that is truly out there, the reports of a puma here or black ‘panther’ there continue to cascade into our lives.
UK's biggest cats
Highland puma, 1980
It’s widely believed that the passing of the Dangerous Wild Animals Act in 1976 led to many private owners of big cats simply releasing them into the wild. That certainly seemed to be the case with a puma or mountain lion captured in Glen Affric in the Scottish Highlands in October 1980.
Rumours of a ferocious ‘black panther’ had circulated in the area for a number of years, but this puma turned out to overweight and tame, and experts estimated she had been roaming loose for no more than 48 hours. She was captured and taken to Highland Wildlife Park.
Cricklewood lynx, 2001
There had been stories, mostly laughed as nothing more than rumours, about an alleged ‘Beast of Barnet’ for a number of years when a very real Eurasian lynx turned up in Cricklewood in May 2001. Exactly where it had come from wasn’t clear, but police and big cat experts had to pursue it across fields and eventually into into a stairwell belonging to a block of flats where it was tranquillised. The female lynx was taken to London Zoo, reported the Barnet Times a decade later, and treated for a broken paw and malnutrition.
Beast of Woodchester, 2012
Gloucestershire had been at the centre of the big cats in Britain myth for many years before the discovery of a young dead roe deer in a secluded valley outside the village of Woodchester sparked almost a tidal wave of speculation about what killed it.
The National Trust – which owns the land where Bambi was found – commissioned tests on swabs taken from the carcass in the hope that any alien felid DNA might be revealed. But the University of Warwick concluded the only carnivores that had been feeding on it were very native foxes, and the Beast of Woodchester was no more.
West Midlands puma, 2014
Numerous sightings of puma-like animals were made in and around 2014, with some centred on a village just outside of Tamworth in Staffordshire – 16 within a mile or two of Walton, according to BBC News. In August of 2014, armed police and a helicopter were mobilised after reports of a big outside a motel in the outskirts of Shrewsbury. A section of the A5 had to be closed, but nothing was found, and it was – presumably – a false alarm.
Derbyshire big cats, 2022 & 2023
The remote wild hills of the Peak District in Derbyshire have recorded numerous speculative sightings in recent years. Two wild campers thought they saw a big cat with a long black tail at Jacob’s Ladder just outside of Edale at the start of the Pennine Way, while a man hiking the River Dane near Three Shires Head found what he believed to be a big cat paw print and several carcasses. But none of these (and other) sightings were ever conclusively shown to have been reliable.
Cumbrian panther, 2023
Cumbrian resident Sharon Larkin-Snowden has described how she saw a black animal the size of a German shepherd feeding on a sheep carcass. She even had the presence of mind to take some swabs which were processed by a specialist laboratory at the University of Warwick, and the results showed the presence of DNA in the Panthera genus, probably either a leopard or jaguar, since only these two big cats have black or melanistic forms.
Aberdeen hybrid, 2023
Footage of black cat-like animal was taken near the village of Blackdog, just north of Aberdeen, in November 2023, with the eye-witness claiming it was hybrid of a South American panther and another species. The footage is far from definitive, with many wildlife experts saying it is very hard to judge the size of animals from a distance and that the tendency is to believe they are bigger than they really are. Gordon Welsh told the Daily Mirror this creature was the height of a greyhound, but it is impossible to be sure.
Cambridgeshire big cat, 2024
Video footage of a black cat patrolling a hedgeline just outside the village of Baston near Peterborough taken in November 2024 appeared, at first, to be conclusive – definitely a big cat, probably a melanistic leopard.
Road worker Jason Dobney estimated the felid was six-feet long. But a big cat expert interviewed by BBC Wildlife saw it differently – it was smaller than it looked, and was a just domestic moggie on a morning stroll. There have been persistent stories of an animal dubbed the Fen tiger for a number of years, but nothing conclusive has ever emerged.
Orpington jaguar, 2024
A father was walking his seven-year-old to school in Orpington, in Kent, in October 2024 when he heard a strange sound coming from a wooded area. All the birds were animated and alert, he added. He then saw a “patterned big cat”, Kent Live reported, that was a yellowy colour with black spots and about 80cm at the shoulder. The man, who was originally from Brazil, said he thought it was a jaguar and that it was stalking birds in a nest.
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