The night I met the Beast of Brandon

YOU know those stories about members of the public who claim to have encountered big cats in quiet corners of the British countryside... this is mine.

I should be quite clear that I don't believe it's plausible for a large population of apex predators to be living in a nation as small and densely-populated as our own.

And yet I saw something on a nature reserve near Coventry more than 20 years ago and I'm intrigued that so many eyewitness accounts continue to trickle in around the country every month.

At the time I was 11-years-old and at Brandon Marsh,  a 220 acre habitat, for a bat walk. It was summer - some time in August I believe - and with the light fading I was the first to emerge from a pre-walk talk on pipistrelles and the like.

But as I stepped out into a courtyard, which looked out across the reserve, I was stunned to see a large feline shape pass by a fence maybe 20 metres from where I was standing.

It was far too large for a domestic cat, the size of a large dog perhaps. Two decades on I have to be honest that being more specific on scale is difficult, but the knee-high posts it was passing in front of made for an alarming reference point at the time. 

I'd also be reluctant to say much about colour since a rapidly deepening dusk meant almost anything would appear dark at the distance. Many, although not all, of British big cat sightings concern melanistic jaguars - more often called panthers. 

The thing that does stick in my mind - and which I remember mentioning to my parents that same evening - was the way the thing moved. It padded just as cats do and then there were the rolling shoulders; the sense of grace even as it moved in a hurry. Even at that age I'd seen foxes and muntjac up close and it was nothing like either.

Two further things must be said which are perhaps typical of these quick glimpse stories. First, I was the only witness. By the time other visitors began to file out behind me the creature had disappeared from view. This leaves the obvious problem of a schoolboy with a big imagination being the only one who'd spotted anything amiss.

And yet this story also has a classic feature of a "trust me, this really happened" account - a spooky coda.

A few hours later - as the reserve wardens stood waiting in the car park for a Green Flag man to let us back into our car (it was an eventful evening) - an interesting topic came up.

Turns out the chef who lived on site to run the centre's newly-opened kitchens had recently got up early one morning and, glancing out of the window, saw a big cat stalking past...

The case is striking in that it marks the one and only time in my life I have seen something apparently inexplicable - or at least very unlikely.

It feels like an occasion in which to apply the famous Sherlock Holmes test: "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."

British big cats are not impossible. Is it likely a large population of panthers and pumas are breeding in this country? No. Is it entirely outside the realms of scientific possibility that at least some are eking an existence out? No. 

So-called "alien" species from exotic shores arrive and sometimes thrive. My local riverbank is now home to a raucous colony of ring necked parakeets. I take extra care when rummaging through old boxes in the garage since the discovery that false widow spiders are now breeding in numbers in the cobwebbed corners.

Leopards, lynxes and the like are of course on a rather different level, although equally I think they should probably be separated out from other strange beast stories in that they undeniably exist in the world today.

Quite clearly this is a different proposition from reports of creatures entirely unknown to science, like the Yeti, or which have been ostensibly extinct for tens of millions of years - plesiosaurs with an apparent predilection for Scottish lochs. 

Cynics might rightly point out that if every shadow to cross a car's headlamps or shaky bit of footage of something vaguely feline in  a farmer's field was credible evidence of big cats then you'd scarcely be about to stroll over Trafalgar Square without spotting one. 

I certainly remember the disappointment during my first summer in a newsroom, when an excitable police sergeant, no less, claimed savage attacks on a prize-winning flock of sheep could only be the work of a big cat.

The farmer was far more prosaic. "Men with dogs," was his blunt assessment of who was to blame for the butchery.

Yes, there is no doubt no shortage of hoaxes and people who've got overexcited by a chance glimpse of Mr Frisky or some other household moggy crossing their path. 

Yet there are also plenty of accounts of big cats being released into the wild at various points in relatively recent history, perhaps most notably by private owners confronted with stricter licences for dangerous animals introduced in the 1970s.

There is also an often unremarked but growing body of evidence to draw on. While there was a bit of a stir last month over reports that animal fur found in Gloucestershire was a 99 per cent match for a big cat, it shouldn't be forgotten that the discovery wasn't a one-off.

A puma was captured in Invernesshire as long ago as the 1980s and lived out its days at a Highland zoo. Later the same decade a jungle cat was struck by a car and killed in Hampshire. In the early noughties a lynx which had been christened the Beast of Barnet was cornered and caught by police in North London.

In some cases the authorities were dealing with a new and publicly declared escapee, in others the origins of the animal are rather less certain.

These cases are oddly overlooked when those sceptical of reports insist there is little by way of concrete proof to accompany the decades of eyewitness accounts. 

I would recommend Phil Minter's excellent website and its associated podcast, which is perhaps one of the most serious efforts to try and investigate what people have been reporting and what to make of it.

In my own case the sighting fuelled a lasting interest in folklore and the unexplained, which often seems in stark contrast to my abiding atheism and disdain for modern-day misinformation campaigns driven by anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers.

In part this is because of my romantic streak - I love a good story - but I suppose the rationalist in me also wants to know why, if the existence of hulking predators really is one great big mass delusion, what's behind it? Why is everyone from gamekeepers to dog walkers convinced they are seeing the same thing?

As to whether what I saw myself some 20 years ago was a bona fide panther or something rather more mundane it will always be impossible to say, but so long as reports continue to flow in from elsewhere the possibility it was something rather unusual remains, however improbable, there...