Category: News

Suffolk Tales, original linocut by artist Gill Thornton, gill-thornton.co.uk inspired by reported sightings of big cats roaming the Suffolk countryside. Used with her kind permission.

Back in June 2025 I was contacted by Gill Thornton, who was preparing to submit artwork to the Black Shuck Festival for that year. She had chosen as a theme a “black panther” seen at Wortham Ling nature reserve, on the Norfolk-Suffolk border, she remembered seeing a blurry photo in the Diss Express local newspaper of a black panther photographed around the nature reserve around the late 1980s. She remembered the animal being dubbed “the Lioness of Ling” at the time.

Thanks to the Edinburgh Fortean Society, I was able to track down some newspaper articles online from the Diss Express. But these were from a later date – August 1996, and they described not a “black panther” but a big cat of a “golden sandy colour”, more like a puma than a melanistic leopard.

Under the headline “Lioness of Ling?”, Melanie Taylor’s Diss Express article from 16   August 1996 described how Marie Collins of Winfarthing and her six-year-old son Robert were walking their dog on the nature reserve (new paths had been opened on the reserve the previous year) when they saw “a large animal… a lioness.”

The Express went on note that “the sighting of a large cat follows numerous other reporting sightings of a puma in the area during the last few years.” Mrs Collins had dubbed the animal she saw a “lioness”, and the Lioness of Ling name seems to have stuck because it’s alliterative and therefore cool, but “lionesses” seen in the wild in Britain are most likely pumas.

Lions are animals of open savannah not the undergrowth, they’re not well adapted to living in the wild in the UK. Lions that do escape from captivity are usually recaptured or shot with a few days, like the escaped lion shot in Cromer, Norfolk in January 1984. The “Darsham Lion” seen dozing by the verge of what was then the Little Chef (now the Two Magpies) in the village of the same name in 2003 was most likely a puma. The “Debenham Lion” seen several times in the 1980s was most likely a puma or possibly a misidentified Maine coon cat. The “Debenham Lion” name probably attached itself to it because that was the name of the local pub (since closed). Both the Debenham Lion and the Darsham Lion are covered in Mystery Animals of Suffolk.

Mrs Collins said of her encounter with the Lioness of Ling “I thought I had seen a lioness. My son screamed and we ran for our lives to the car… I could see its whole body, it was a golden sandy colour, and was lying in a field. It turned around and looked at me, and that is when we ran… It was much too big to be a dog and too small to be a donkey.” She also described finding “clumps of fur on some wire nearby.”

Steve Hammond of the Upper Waveney Valley Project, that has a role in managing the Wortham Ling nature reserve, believed it was “quite plausible that large cats were living wild in the area” among “a great deal of shrubbery and brambles for the animals to hide in and plenty of food to eat.” He probably meant large feral or domestic cats, though. PC Graham Pettitt of Halesworth Police confirmed that they’d been contacted but could find no trace of the animal. There was the usual confirmation that all big cats kept in local zoos were accounted for.

Diss Express journalist Melanie Taylor followed up with another article on 23 August 1996,  “Paw prints clue to ‘Ling lioness’”. Peter Reader, a farmer from nearby South Lopham, claimed to have seen “large paw marks on his land” subsequent to the Collins’s sighting. Something had gone into the tractor shed and made “very large unusual paw prints, both inside and out.” Other readers had also since contacted the Express with “suspected sightings of big cats in the Diss area,” although no more detail was given.

But in response to Mrs Collins’s testimony about finding on nearby barbed wire the fur of the animal of a  “golden sandy colour”, local Wortham-based farmer Stephen Rash said his field adjoining Wortham Ling nature reserve has highland cattle in it, and that would account for the fur left on the wire. He speculated that the Collins’s could briefly have seen one of his highland cattle and mistaken it for a lioness. (The bit about misidentifying the fur on some barbed wire seems to me much more likely than mistaking a horned highland cow for a puma.)

The “Afterthoughts” column of the Diss Express of 30th August 1996, “Kay Hunter’s Views on Country Life,” had the title “The mystery of a Ling lioness”. In a rather lame column that didn’t really come to any conclusions, Hunter agreed that it would be hard to misidentify a Highland cow, but also expressed the opinion that “August is a wicked month” and made hints about the “silly season.” She did refer, however, to more readers recently contacting the Express about their experiences” and “the well documented evidence of the lorry driver in last week’s letters page.”

The Ling lioness was apparently still enough in people’s minds to be referenced in an equally lame Diss Express Mere Quacks cartoon strip by Mike Webb on 27 September 1996.

The year 1996, the year of the sightings in Ling, saw the beginning of a wave of big cat sightings across Ipswich and environs and South Suffolk, although most witnesses reported a black big cat, which was given the nickname “Claws” by the Ipswich-based Evening Star newspaper. There were a few reports of puma-like cats seen, while an anonymous reader contacted the East Anglian Daily Times in 1997 to say that he’d recently released somewhere a male puma named Khyber. (It’s all in Mystery Animals of Suffolk.)

Gill Thornton has a vague memory, though, of a blurry photo of a black big cat appearing in the Diss Express in the late 1980s, she can’t pinpoint the year. Research into mystery animals has shown, though, that our recollections of newspaper articles seen decades ago can be wrong. Diss Express did have very good coverage of big cat sightings up until at least the mid-2010s.

This phenomenon is known in cryptozoology (the study of animals not yet formally described to science) as “the Thunderbird photo”,after a missing photo said to show American soldiers in uniforms from around the Civil War era, posing with their firearms around a pterodactyl-like animal they’ve shot down. The photo was said to have a barn in the background, and so on. People insist they’d seen the Thunderbird photo in a newspaper or magazine, but it cannot be found. Various attempts have been made to fake it, these are usually quickly proven to be hoaxes, mostly because the re-enactors in Civil War uniforms are middle-aged and a bit overweight, unlike the very young and half-starved authentic Civil War era soldiers.

It is entirely possible that Gill Thornton did see a blurry photo of a black big cat in the Diss Express of the late 1980s as well, and that it had been forgotten about by 1996. (Journalists didn’t stay long in local news in those days either.) Or maybe her recollection is correct but the date was later.

I heard a story about a man who “kept lions” in a village near Diss in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and that some government agency seized these, and that it was in the Diss Express at the time, but as yet I’ve not been able to track this article down.

I also heard via the Edinburgh Fortean Society that the Ling lioness was a persistent rumour among school students locally from the late 1980s.

Suffolk Wildlife Trust’s interpretation board on Wortham Ling nature reserve in 2025.

I was sent some interesting footage of a black cat moving around a freshly harvested field in Darsham, near the major A12 road, not far from the coast and not far where I am based at Dunwich. My thanks  to Neil Holloway, who sent me a link to the footage, shot when he was holidaying in mid-August at a house near the village of Darsham’s Brussels Green, so named because Belgian refugees settled there in World War One.

The footage is linked from here.

As is often the case with such British cat footage, it’s hard to judge the distance of the animal or to work out its size. I hope to make contact with the owner of the property from whose window the cat was filmed, and if possible the farmer whose field it is, with a view to visiting the location and measuring some distances.

The stubble left by most combine harvesters is around 15cm (six inches) high. Most of  the animal in the footage appears to easily clear the top of the stubble. The witness said the animal appeared to be stalking some kind of prey, which would make sense – the field having being harvested that day would expose a lot of rodents and rabbits suddenly.

The animal’s body and neck appear to be proportionally longer than a domestic cat’s, and closer to the proportions of a leopard. The footage appears to show what might be pointed ears, though, which are very rare among leopards – the ears of leopards are usually short and rounded.

A witness who saw a black leopard-like cat on wetland near Aldeburgh in November 2021 saw the footage from Darsham and said it appeared to be same animal that he’d seen near Aldeburgh.

There was a sighting of a black leopard seen in a tree at night in a campsite near Hacheston, 12 miles due southwest of Darsham, three days after the Darsham sighting.

Regular visitors to the website will know I have in recent years received an increasing number of reports of an exceptionally big, dark-coloured feral domestic cat seen in the county of Suffolk a bit further south, around the Brightwell area (near Martlesham).

Since the Darsham sighting there has been another report of an animal described as  “similar to a house cat but way bigger” – twice the size of a house cat and black in colour, which briefly followed a cyclist on the 425-mile Further Equinox cycle race at night on 28 September 2025.

The cyclist was following their GPS route of the race on their phone on their handlebars in total darkness at the time, with only a cycle light to light the road ahead of them, so they had no idea where they were other than that it was somewhere between Diss (just over the Norfolk border) and Wangford (near Southwold, quite a long way east of Diss.) The witness also reported that another cyclist on the same race had encountered a similar animal on the previous night, although his report didn’t say where.

Analysis of a human skeleton from what is a believed to be a cemetery for gladiators from Roman York shows bite marks on the bones of one individual, known as . This strongly suggests the gladiator was picked up and carried in the jaws of a lion – likely after the lion had killed or wounded him in the arena.

This is the conclusion of an article entitled “Unique osteological evidence for human-animal gladiatorial combat in Roman Britain,” in the journal Plos One from April 2025. (Linked from the article title above.)

This is significant because it’s the best evidence yet for big cats in Roman Britain. It’s surprising because it would cost a lot of money and effort to bring a lion all the way over from Africa or Eastern Turkey or the Middle East (the extent of the lion’s range at the time) to the city of Eboracum (York), not even the capital of a far flung province of the Empire. Venatores were specialists attached to the Roman army tasked with capturing exotic animals for the circus, or more mundane game animals on which t feed the troops.

Some believe that today’s British big cats have their origins in a tiny relict population of surviving big cats let loose or escaped from gladiatorial arenas, augmented over time by escapes from menageries and circuses before their population exploded following releases from private zoos after the Dangerous Wild Animals Act came into force in the 1970s.

There are a number of problems with this. Firstly, lions are creatures of the open savannah, not adapted for life in the British countryside as leopards, pumas and lynxes are. When lions do escape in  the UK, they are usually captured or shot within a few days. This doesn’t exclude the possibility that there were leopards in Roman British circuses too, who would have fared better in the wild in Roman Britain. (Leopard remains were found in a Roman rubbish dump in Rome and in a Roman army camp in present day Romania.)

But the big cats brought over at great cost to Britain were brought to be slaughtered in front of a crowd. While the lion in York seems to have survived long enough to pick up and briefly carry off a gladiator, its life expectancy in the arena wouldn’t have been great.

Long before the Roman Empire collapsed, big cats and other exotics were in short supply for the arena. The demand for elephants and big cats for combat in the arena had stripped North Africa of these species. Accounts of late Roman Empire circus spectacles include staged hunts of herds of deer in the arena, presumably because big cats and elephants were getting rarer and harder to source. (Gladiatorial combat between humans fell out of fashion with the adoption of Christianity, but the spectacular slaughter of animals in the arena continued right up to Empire’s end.)

As Roman territory shrank, sourcing big cats and shipping them to the frequently rebellious province of Britain –  sometimes out of Roman control entirely and ruled by local usurpers – became even harder. Big cats being around at the end of Roman Britain and then let loose seems less and less likely, given all these factors.

See here for earlier evidence of a caracal exotic wildcat in Roman Norfolk, and for more on evidence (or the lack of it) for big cats in Roman Britain.

An Asian caracal wildcat, a gift to the East India Company from the Nawab of Bengal, its puppet ruler, arrived at the Tower of London in 1759. Named the Siyagoest, the caracal was accompanied by its keeper, Abdullah.

The story is on the Historic Royal Palaces website.

For evidence of a caracal in Roman Norfolk, see here.

Two photos of a possible melanistic leopard seen near Eye. The copyright holder is known to me.

I was sent these two photos on 23 April 2025 by a witness near Eye in North Suffolk, who doesn’t want to give any further identifying details.

They told me they’d seen a large black animal walking up and down along the tree line at the end of a field behind their garden, the distance from where they were to the animal when they photographed it was a good few minutes walk. They observed it for more than five minutes before it sat down “with its head up”, which is when they took these photos. They were taken using the zoom on a Samsung phone of recent vintage.

There’s a third photo, but it’s the usual black blur we have come to expect from mobile photo cameras trying to do wildlife photography without huge lenses.

Below are cropped, blown up versions of the two photos. In one of them it seems to show a sleek, shiny-furred black seated animal’s head, possibly turned to the side, with its paws out in front and short, rounded ears visible on the top of its head. All these features are found in melanistic (black) leopards, by far the most commonly reported big cat in Suffolk and in the UK.

If – as it appears – the animal has its head to the side, then it would rule out a misidentified dumped realistic soft toy “panther”, which are often in a sitting position and have been mistaken for big cats in the past. (The Trimley tiger and the tiger in Siam Gardens, Sudbury – Suffolk Free Press, 28 February 2012 – are examples. But some big cats that turned out to be real, such as the Beccles lynx, were originally written off as misidentified dumped soft toys.)

The witness reported hearing “growling” around the nearby village of Mendlesham “a few months ago” and says they go out shooting and know their deer, they were convinced it wasn’t a rutting deer they heard. They also report having seen the hindquarters and tail of a black big cat disappearing into the undergrowth back in around 2002, in their childhood, in another nearby village.

I have sent the photos to some experts and I am awaiting their opinions on these.

Cropped and blown-up versions of the above photos.

See also my gallery of evidence for big cats in and around Suffolk, including videos.

This is my map of recent big cat sightings in Suffolk (one in Norfolk and a report of footprints in Essex) received between July 2024 and February 2025, ahead of my recent talk at Moyse’s Hall Museum where it was shown for the first time.

It includes “historical” big cat reports going back to 1990s, but reported within this time period.

There’s a cluster of big cat kills reported in the area around Wickham Market on this map. I have photos of these, see the photos here. 

I neglected to explain the multiple exclamation marks !!! in the key. This is a report of “sawing” sounds thought to have been made by a big cat at Wantiseden near Woodbridge.

For an analysis of recent trends in Suffolk big cat sightings, see here. See also more maps.

As I prepare for another talk, I’ve taken a look at the data that’s come in to bigcatsofsuffolk.com since my last talk, which was in July 2024. (For more on trends in sightings for  most of 2023 and 2024, see here.)

The pie chart above shows the total number of all credible big cat sightings in Suffolk that I’ve heard about up to February 2025. I’ve included any sightings that are just over the other side of the Suffolk border and less than two miles within Norfolk, Essex or Cambridgeshire.

That’s a total of 228 reported sightings going all the way back to the earliest credible report of a big cat in Suffolk, from way back in 1976 or 1977.

There are 35 new reports that came in during the last six months. I’ve excluded a few reports that were very vague or in which the witness was very unsure of whether they’d seen a big cat or not.  

An analysis of big cat sightings reported to bigcatsofsuffolk.com between July 2024 and February 2025 shows that there are more reports than previously of sightings of melanistic (black) leopards, with fewer pumas (just one reported in this period) and fewer lynxes too. There was an increase in pumas and lynxes reported in the twelve months from July 2023-July 2024, but this trend seems to have tailed off again.

In most “county samples” from different regions of the UK, there’s a trend towards about three quarters of the sample being black leopards, less than a quarter pumas, and a small percentage of lynxes. These proportions are about the same in my sample from Suffolk, except that about a quarter of the sample is “indeterminate” big cats, where the witnesses were unable to say what type of big cat they had seen, or where a newspaper report or police FOIA disclsoure just mentioned a sighting of a big cat without giving further details.

This current trend towards a proportion of about three quarters of the same being black leopards, less than a quarter pumas, and a small percentage of lynxes is more in line with “county samples” from around the UK.

Out of the 35 encounters with big cats that were reported in the past six months, 15 of these encounters had taken place very recently – within a a few days or in some cases of a few hours of the sighting. Of these, 12 big cats were described by the witness as being like a black leopard, with just one puma and one lynx reported, and with just one “indeterminate” big cat of an unknown big cat reported.

There was an increase in what I call “historical sightings”, recent reports of sightings that happened years ago, some from the early 2010s or even the noughties. I was able to match one recent report of a historical sighting, in Coddenham back in 2010, with a sighting that showed up in a Suffolk Police Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) disclosure. There were 20 such “historical” sightings reported in Suffolk in the last six months.

There was a slight increase in reports of indeterminate big cats – where the witness didn’t say what type of big cat they’d seen. This is particularly true for recently received “historical” sightings. Some of these indeterminate cats sound from their brief description like an absolutely enormous feral domestic cat – I’m hearing more reports of these, particularly from around the Woodbridge-Martlesham area. There were nine such “historical” sightings featuring “indeterminate” big cats in this period, nine melanistic leopards seen a while ago and two lynxes seen in recent years.

Recent geographical clusters of big cat sightings have been around Bury St Edmunds in October 2024 and around the Wickham Market area up to January 2025. At the request of witnesses I am being vague about these locations. Both clusters involve reports of melanistic leopards. The trend in reports from the Bury cluster was in reports of smaller than usual black leoapards, including a possible melanistic leopard cub.

Another recent trend is that there are more reports of sounds or vocalisations thought to be made by big cats. But I’m cautious about these, as expert analysis of of two such recordings sent to me turned out to be from a fox and a red deer. I’ve excluded these two from the sample.

For most of the past five decades, a significant majority of big cat witnesses in Suffolk have been male. This was partly to connected to traditionally male occupations that saw men out and about and travelling (usually driving) around dusk and dawn, when bug cats are most active. Since I launched the website in late 2023, though, there has been a noticeable increase in female big cat witnesses. With the last 18 months, a significant majority of witnesses are female. A greater diversity of witnesses would tend to increase the   credibility of the reports.