The Beast of Bodmin Moor: Sightings and the 1995 Inquiry

A big black cat, the size of a leopard, crosses the road on Bodmin Moor and slips into the bracken. Reports like this have come from the moor, which the A30 crosses, since the late 1970s. Unlike many road legends, this one has a real paper trail, including a government inquiry. That inquiry did not find a cat.

What the record actually shows

Popular accounts date the first sightings to about 1978 and speak of more than 60 reports in the years that followed. Those counts come from secondary writers, not from a published register, so treat them as rough. By the 1990s people living around the moor were worried enough about a big cat attacking livestock that the government stepped in.

In response, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food asked its advisory service, ADAS, to investigate. The inquiry ran for about six months and reported in 1995. It invited farmers and the public to send in sightings, photographs, video and reports of kills. The folklorist David Clarke, who has read the files, summarises what it found. A well-known photograph of a “big cat” on a gatepost was re-shot with a one-metre measuring pole beside the post. The animal stood no more than about 30cm at the shoulder, the size of a house cat. A night shot of supposed leopard eyes showed narrow vertical pupils, a domestic cat’s feature. Of three plaster casts of prints, two came from a cat and one from a dog. None of the livestock deaths it checked showed signs of a big cat. Foxes, badgers and crows had mostly scavenged sheep that died of natural causes. The report said there was “no verifiable evidence” of a big cat, while adding that it could never prove one was not there.

Days after the report, on 24 July 1995 by later accounts, a boy found a large cat skull on the bank of the River Fowey. The Natural History Museum confirmed it came from a real young male leopard. It also concluded the skull had been cut from a leopard-skin rug. The animal had died abroad and reached Britain as a trophy.

In July 1998 an amateur video, about 20 seconds long and shot near Jamaica Inn, was hailed by some wildlife experts as the best proof yet. The ministry agreed to look at it. No new finding followed.

The history behind the legend

Bodmin Moor has its own deep folklore, and Cornwall’s Jamaica Inn sits at its heart. The big cat story is modern, though. It belongs to a wider British wave of “phantom cat” reports from the 1970s onward, such as the Beast of Exmoor.

A common explanation links the wave to the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976, which brought in licences for keeping big cats. Some owners, the theory runs, released animals rather than license them. A related story says the circus owner Mary Chipperfield let three pumas loose in 1978. Neither claim has been documented for Bodmin. Escapes do happen, though. A puma was caught in Inverness-shire in 1980.

How to read it

The case is better evidenced than most cryptid legends because people tried to test it. The tests came back with house cats, a dog and a rug. That does not prove every witness was wrong. A large cat could pass through a sparsely watched moor for a while. But nothing physical has ever tied one to Bodmin.

Distance is hard to judge on open moorland, and a black animal with nothing beside it for scale can look much larger than it is. The inquiry’s gatepost test shows exactly that. The Beast of Bodmin stays where the 1995 report left it, possible but unproven.

Sources

• David Clarke, “Cat’s out of the bag?” (2014) — what the 1995 MAFF/ADAS files contain
• Farmers Weekly, “Video evidence gives new credence to Beast of Bodmin” (22 July 1998) — the 1998 video and the 1995 finding
• Wikipedia, British big cats — the River Fowey skull, the 1976 Act, the 1980 Inverness-shire puma
• Historic Mysteries, Beast of Bodmin Moor — dates for the report and skull find, the 1978 start of sightings