Beast of Bodmin

The Beast of Bodmin Moor is the most famous of Britain's 'alien big cats' — a large, black, panther-like creature reported prowling the wild uplands of Cornwall since the 1970s and blamed for slain and mutilated livestock. Witnesses describe a powerful cat three to five feet long with a heavy tail and glowing eyes, glimpsed at dusk among the granite tors and bracken. Grainy photographs and plaster casts of paw-prints have fuelled the legend without ever settling it.

In 1995 the government commissioned an official investigation, which found no verifiable evidence of a big cat on the moor — yet within days a boy found a leopard skull by the River Fowey, later judged to have come from an imported rug. Sightings carried on regardless. The Beast belongs to a modern wave of British cryptid folklore, often traced to exotic pets released into the countryside after the Dangerous Wild Animals Act of 1976; whether flesh, escapee or imagination, it has made Bodmin Moor a byword for the watchful dark.