Category: News

THE YEAR 2025 was another active one for bigcatsofsuffolk.com, with the months of May and August particularly busy. There seems to have been something of a wave of Suffolk big cat reports around that time. 

There were 24 reports of sightings of big cats in the county in the year 2025.

Mostly melanistic leopards again

This year’s reported big cats were overwhelmingly melanistic leopards – 18 big cats reported are from their description melanistic leopards. A long tail with a blunt end that curved up was described in many of these reports. More than one report mentioned small, rounded ears. There were two reported possible pumas in this year, both in West Suffolk, also one “tabby cat” with a stubby tail that could have been a lynx, and three reports of “a big cat” with no further detail.  There were some interesting photos of a possible big cat taken this year in a village near Eye, as well as some interesting video footage of a possible big cat filmed in a field in Darsham.

These indeterminate big cats included a “big cat” (no further details) reported at Stowmarket football club’s ground on 14 April 2025, and a 2025 report by an informant of being told in around 2015 by a friend in the Forestry Commission that there were “cats” in Rendlesham Forest. (There were numerous local sightings at that time.)

A new phenomenon involves dog-walkers contacting me to check whether there have been any big cat sightings in the area where they take their dogs for a walk is free of big cats. Weirdly, I’ve had several people contact me this year report a big cat sighting without leaving any contact details which has never happened before.

Hotspots – around the Deben and the A12, Bury and the Waveney

The busiest regions of the county of Suffolk for big cat activity this past year has been around the Deben, the Woodbridge area, and in a corridor around the A12 from Carlton Woods (near Saxmundham) to Darsham and Bramfield (west of the A12). The Norfolk border along the River Waveney has also been busy, as it has been on and off for many years.  Bury St Edmunds and environs has seen a few sightings in 2025, although not as busy as in 2024. The normally busy Suffolk-Cambridgeshire border has been strangely quiet of late in terms of big cat activity.

See below for earlier maps and updates on Suffolk big cat sightings for the previous few years.

Yes, photos and video!

 

 

There was one recent set of photos of a possible big cat, taken in a village near Eye, in April 2025. The proximity of the location to Ed Sheeran’s estate in Dennington (not all that near!) resulted in the story making the front page of the Daily Star. It also made the Mail and got me a live interview on Channel 5 News. There was also a claim made on Mysterious Cats in Suffolk Facebook group that there had been four local sightings of big cats around Eye up to May 2025, including two cubs and a mother.

There was in addition some video of an animal thought to be a big cat in a field in Darsham. I hope to return to the location and do some measuring of distances. Thanks to Neil Holloway for the footage.

Historical reports from way back when

I also received several “historical reports” in 2025 – witnesses contacting me about sightings they had experienced years ago, in some cases decades ago. In some recent years, around half of all the reports I get are “historical reports”, although not this year – most reports in 2025 came in the day after the encounter happened, in two cases the report came in the same day as the sighting. Witnesses are sending in reports very soon after their encounters – one arrived just 45 minutes after it happened.

Most encounters are reported as happening when the witness was driving at night, with the big cat seen in their headlights, or while walking their dogs early in the morning. Since bigcatsofsuffolk.com was set up in 2023, more witnesses are female, breaking a trend since records began of witnesses being overwhelmingly male. 2025 is the first year in which a narrow majority of witnesses are female.

One witness recently described to me a sighting from the first Suffolk big cat wave of 1996-1997. They were a school student at the time, on the bus to school. Between the Seven Hills roundabout and the Foxhall Road roundabout (they’re minutes away from each other by car) they saw “a black animal moving in the field, and thinking it was a large dog because of the size, but it was the shape and movements of a cat.”

The 1997-1977 wave of Suffolk big cat sightings, the biggest such wave, saw numerous sightings around Ipswich (particularly around the Foxhall Road area) and South Suffolk. Most sightings involved a black big cat. The wave of sightings was well documented by the Ipswich-based Evening Star in particular. That newspaper gave a name to the animal at the centre of the sightings, “Claws”, and offered a £250 reward for its photo, still unclaimed. (It’s all in Mystery Animals of Suffolk.) It’s fascinating to hear an account in 2025 from a witness to a big cat all those years ago, back when they were still at school.

Another “historic sighting” that came to light in 2025 was the “Ling lioness,” a puma seen at least once in Wortham Ling, a nature reserve on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. My thanks to Gill Thornton and to Gordon Rutter of the Edinburgh Fortean Society who helped track this down. There’s more on the Ling lioness here. There were apparently persistent reports about a big cat in the area going back to the late 1980s, confirmed by an informant who went to school locally at the time. A farmer nearby reported finding big cat footprints.

Yet another witness who contacted me in 2025 recalled seeing in 2015, so a decade previously, “something big and dark” seen in woods in Haughley, with footprints found nearby.

In late March I received a historical report of a “grey lynx-like wildcat” seen in bushes illuminated by a security light by a witness looking out of a window of a house in Walberswick on night in “around 2007.” They described how the animal “opened its mouth aggressively” as if hissing at the witness.

One final historical report: in March 2025 I received testimony of a man fishing at Shingle Street – a beach on the Bawdsey Peninsula – sometime before 2017. The man saw that a black big cat was “watching” him from a distance. He slowly “backed away” to his car nearby.

Most reports received in 2025, though, were contemporary reports, often reporting sightings that had happened on the same day. I was contacted by a gamekeeper who’d had multiple sightings of a muscular, shiny black big cat with a long, turned up tail that he described as a “black jaguar” on his estate. We agreed to be vague about the location, we decided on “near Helmingham Hall” as a description. My informant has also found multiple kill signs over the years – a goose, a Chinese water deer and a hare – all showing signs of predation by a big carnivore. (See her from some other recent possible big cat kill signs.) He monitors rabbit and deer populations locally as part of his job, he says the rabbits and deer have “gone” immediately after a sighting of the big cat.

A sudden drop in rabbit population after a big cat sighting was a phenomenon also mentioned by a witness who very briefly saw a “dark or black” big cat with a long tail a Seckford near Woodbridge, by the golf course in June 2023, reported in 2025. This witness also monitors the usually abundant rabbit population as part of their job. It crashed after their sighting. The carcass of a muntjac deer showing signs of predation by something big was found shortly afterwards.

I received three reports from outside Suffolk but still in East Anglia. One was from not far from the Suffolk border at Shelton Street, Norfolk.   Another sighting was from further north in Norfolk on the A47 Acle Straight road that goes east to Acle from Great Yarmouth on the coas, finally in Essex at Howe Street near Chelmsford, on the B1008 Essex to Braintree road, a courier in a truck got a good look at a “jet black… majestic looking… quite lean” big cat siting in a ditch by the side of the road.

Sightings from South Suffolk are rare. From Chilton near Sudbury came a report of “something I can’t explain” seen in a field, with a photo that – like many I receive – was just a dark blur form which I couldn’t conclude anything. The witness also reported the corpse of a fox predated on by something had been found in the village at around that time, while a neighbour’s dog had been savagely attacked by something. The dog was out of sight for 30 seconds, it was found with multiple puncture marks to the chest and abdomen and left with a broken leg requiring six metal plates to repair.

There are, however, many reports of attacks on dogs by muntjac deer, who leave puncture marks with their little  fangs. I’ve heard more anecdotal evidence of such attacks in Suffolk, they seem to be on the increase. More study is needed into this phenomenon before we can rule out a muntjac attack in this case, rather than a big cat. A Shootinguk correspondent now based in Suffolk notes that many male muntjac have broken fangs, suggesting that they ‘ve used them in combat, and asserts that they know of several attacks by muntjac on gun dogs, including fatal attacks. There are even reports of muntjacs attacking people elsewhere in East Anglia. Please pass on to me any information on muntjac attacks on dogs.

From Pentlow, not far from Chilton, came a report in May 2025 of a “black or dark cat the size of a medium or large dog”, three feet (1m) head to rump, with a tail that was thick and curved at the end and “smallish ears”. It was seen walking slowly across a country road for ten seconds by a mother and son driving past.

Possible pumas

In the “possible puma” department, there were two sightings of possible pumas from West Suffolk in the year 2025. On the night of 1 May 2025, at Morton Hall on the edge of Bury St Edmunds, a “light coloured” big cat with a long, thickish tail, big feet… about the size of a deer, but more plump with large ears” was seen from the witness’s windows for two minutes as it “walked slowly.” At Gedding, near Bradfield Woods, a witness driving in the dark at 1am on 12 August 2025 saw a “tan coloured… massive, massive cat” with a “massive long tail” run across the road ten feet ahead of them.

Really huge feral cats?

One report featured something that sounded like a very big feral or domestic cat. The witness described it as having “pointed ears” and being 60cm long – big for a feral cat or domestic cat, but not record-breakingly big. It was seen for a few minutes just before midday on 14 April 2025 at Bramfield (between Darsham and Halesworth) and described as  “large, fully black cat… investigating something around a tree”, and “unconcerned about cars” which could also suggest a larger feral or domestic cat. 

In recent years there has been a cluster of sightings and kill signs around the Wickham Market area (I have been asked to be vague here). This continued in 2025, with a witness reporting a 2020 encounter while walking their dog in the village of Easton very early one morning. The animal was 200 yards away on a footpath, it was bigger than a Labrador, “sitting there, staring at me”. It turned sideways so that the witness could see it in profile, it had “rounded ears” and a tail that was “really long” sticking out at the back, curling.” The animal “slunk off.” I now have a small network of informants in the area, one of whom informed me that a black big cat was seen in a tree at night near Hacheston on the night of 19 August 2025.

Also possibly in the “huge feral or domestic cat” department was the 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 East 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 illuminate 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. I contacted the Further Equinox race organisers and also DotWatcher who track these races and provide commentary, neither of them had heard any reports of big cats on the route. The route of the race is here.

The witness described the animal as briefly “playfully” following them “at speed” (about 16mph) on the route before “disappearing” which is behaviour more like a feral or domestic cat than a melanistic leopard or wildcat.

Other big cat sightings reported in 2025 include a “large black panther-like creature” seen by two witnesses driving into Mendlesham back in 2017, just south of the village on the road going south to Stowupland. It “crossed the road in front of our car” before “it disappeared into a ditch and thick foliage.” It “had a long tail that curved up at the end”, so possibly another black leopard.

Two sightings 25 miles and 90 minutes apart

A husband and wife travelling in a car on the A1120 just West of Badingham at around 6.30pm on 23 March 2025 reported a “black big cat running very fast”, crossing the road 50m ahead of them. They only saw it for a couple of seconds, just long enough to note “its size and speed of running, and its way of running like a cat… cat-like fast running.” It was the “size of a large dog.”

Just an hour and a half later on the same day at The Street in Belstead, southeast of Ipswich and near Jimmy’s Farm and Wildlife Park, another witness driving in “very dark and windy conditions” saw a big cat from 15 metres away for a few seconds. It was black with “a long black tail, 5ft long… agile”, seen for a couple of seconds 15m away. They reported it to me 45 minutes later, which is the shortest interval between a sighting and a report that I’ve ever had.

Belstead is around 25 miles due southwest of Badingham, there’s no way a black leopard or indeed any animal could cross that distance in just 45 minutes, so these two sightings such a short space of time apart strongly suggest there is more than one big cat out there in Suffolk.

Very early in the morning of 10 May 2025, a driver passing through the village of Ingham – near Bury St Edmunds and on the A138 – saw from the cab of their lorry “the hindquarters and tail of a black big cat slowly slinking away into a hedge.” The witness described it as “at least three feet long, black, smooth fur, tail almost curled up at the end”. I’ve heard several reports of sightings by lorry or truck drivers over the years – their cabs are a lot higher up than the driving seats of cars, which means lorry drivers can see further and occasionally see big cats behind hedges or in ditches that are concealed from most drivers.

From Tostock came a very brief report of a “panther” with a long thick tail, seen on 8 August 2025, “sniffing around the bushes”, the witness’s dog gave chase. No further details were supplied.

There was one sighting of a possible lynx or bobcat this year – from Hadleigh on 31 August. The witness got a good look at the animal for five minutes from 12 feet away. They described a “tabby” cat, larger and stockier than a domestic cat with a stubby tail”. “It was just sitting there then it jogged away into a bush”.

Normally I expect an increase in sightings come autumn – the September 2024 was particularly busy for big cat reports, for example. Big cat investigators around the UK generally note an uptick in big cat sightings in the autumn. It is thought that this is because there’s less foliage for big cats to hide in during the autumn, and that there’s less abundant wildlife around so big cats have to work harder to find food, so are more likely to show themselves. After a moderately busy late Spring and summer, though, there was nothing like the expected autumnal wave of big cat sightings in 2025. Autumn was quiet. This could be because the weather has been so mild that the foliage stayed abundant right up until mid-November and beyond, so the big cats could stay hidden.

October 2025 saw a relatively urban sighting that lasted “30 to 60 seconds”, right in the middle of the busy Martlesham Heath trading estate near Ipswich, seen in headlights at around 10pm. According to the witness, “it was standing, slightly crouched at the side of the road, as if it had just come out of the shrubs and bushes. I saw its green eyes first as they reflected the car headlights, and I looked expecting to see a fox or muntjac, but saw a large black cat. As the car went past it, it turned and slunk into the bushes… About the size of an adult Labrador dog… Black – I think rounded ears.” The witness noted that they regularly see muntjac round there.

From Haddon Approach near Haddon Hall, on the shore of the River Deben, on east bank of the river opposite the town of Woodbridge on the west bank, comes a sighting of 8 November 2025, reported on the same day. The animal, seen for 10 seconds from roughly ten yards away, “must have heard us coming and was just slinking into cover up a sloping branch.” It was “jet black” with a “strong muscular back end and cat tail” and “four times, possibly five times as big” as a domestic tomcat, “30 inches (77cm) or a bit bigger.” 77cm is big for a domestic cat but not record-breakingly so. Feral cats of that size (male and black, often long haired and found in forests) have turned up at Suffolk animal rescue centres. The cat made a “low crawl up into cover.”

A deerstalker reports “multiple” sightings in the area around Otley, near Ipswich, up to March 2025. Another informant from Otley reports finding the body of a hare “cached” under a log locally. In April of 2025, someone “out lamping” at night witnessed a black big cat running across a field near Kenton (near the Aspall cider orchard,) seen in the beam of a headlamp.

From Carlton Woods near Saxmundham (not to be confused with the better-known Carlton Marshes near Lowestoft), came a brief report of a black big cat very briefly glimpsed in April 2025. This followed a report of “the front end of a deer” briefly glimpsed “up a tree” in the same woods at the end of March, by a witness who said they’d return the following day to see if it was still there. I didn’t hear from them after that.

That concludes our round-up of big cat sightings in Suffolk in the year 2025. Any more 2025 sightings that are reported after I write at the end of November will have to wait till next year’s round-up. As I am no longer based in Suffolk it is becoming harder for me to keep track of big cat activity there. In the coming year I will be looking for people who live more locally to take over the admin of bigcatsofsuffolk.com.

I am pleased to say others are already taking on some of the work of monitoring big cats in the county. I have been able to put several groups of local witnesses (sometimes witnesses to multiple encounters) in contact with each other. These informal groups now exchange information on the latest sightings in their area. I am aware of two projects – at different ends of the county – recently started or starting up involving trail cams monitoring for big cats. One is already up and running and producing photos of wildlife – no big cats yet. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, you can support me on Ko-fi and Mystery Animals of Suffolk is on sale online via Bittern Books.  See also a list of bookshops that stock the book. You can sign up for alerts, updates and events here. (Scroll down to the bottom of that page.)

My map of reports of big cat sightings in Suffolk from June 2024-February 2025 is here. My map of sightings of sightings in the county between October 2022 and June 2024 is here. See also my analysis of trends in sightings in Suffolk within that period. See also my map of sightings reported between 2017 and 2022. along with other maps.  For data on big cat sightings and maps before October 2022  –  going back all the way to around 1976 – you’ll have to buy Mystery Animals of Suffolk.  Why June 2024 to February 2025 and why October 2022 and June 2024? These were the intervals between talks on the big cats of Suffolk, at which I provided updates.

In other out-of-place animals in Suffolk news, 2025 also saw a mini-wave of wallaby sightings in the county in August, in Ilkesthall St Andrew and not far away a few days later in Wissett. 

 

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 Individual 6DT19. 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 for most of the period that the gladiator cemetery was in use.

There were, however the three years from 208 to 211 when the Emperor Septimus Severus was in Britannia leading a massive military campaign north of Hadrian’s Wall against the Caledonian tribes of what’s now Scotland. Septimus Severus and the imperial family, the massive imperial entourage as well as the office of the fiscus, the imperial treasurer, were all based in York for those years. The basilica (the public building near the forum) at York was probably enlarged in preparation for the Emperor’s stay. A massive pillar from the basilica outside York Minster still survives, which gives an idea of the  scale of the temporary imperial capital.

Septimus Severus, then at the venerable age of 65 and so crippled by gout he has to be carried on a litter, didn’t expect to be returning to Rome from York. He died in York in September 211. His sons and heirs Caracalla and Geta (briefly joint emperors) quickly returned to Rome for the power struggle that followed, but for the three preceding years large-scale gladiatorial games with imperial patronage and likely with imported lions and all were a thing in York. (Septimus Severus in Scotland: The Northern campaigns of the first Hammer of the Scots,  Simon Elliott, Greenhill Books, Barnsley, 2018.)

Throughout most of the period of the Roman Empire, Venatores were specialists attached to the Roman army tasked with capturing exotic animals for the circus, or more mundane game animals on which to 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,  big cats and other “exotics” 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 the 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.

This article was updated on 31 03 2026 to include detail on the Roman Imperial capital being at York from 208 to 211, as a possible explanation for evidence of a lion imported into the gladiatorial arena of this relatively far-flung provincial town. 

 

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.