It was in 1978 when the “Beast of Bodmin” hit the headlines, sparking a wave of similar sightings of big cats around Britain. The fascination has only grown. As recently as January 2023, a black panther was allegedly spotted in Wendover Woods, Buckinghamshire. Last autumn, a video purported to show a large black cat devouring a sheep in a Derbyshire field, shortly after a camper said he recorded a leopard outside his tent in the Peak District. Even the BBC presenter Clare Balding once claimed to have seen an “enormous” predator while recording her BBC Radio 4 programme Ramblings near Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire.

“There’s a fascination with monsters,” says tracker and naturalist Rhoda Watkins, another of the documentary’s contributors. “We evolved in response to having large predators and in places where that threat isn’t so real, I think we need to feed that gap.

“But while I do think we’re primed to be fascinated by monsters, having spent time tracking and having spoken to credible witnesses, I have no doubts that there are big cats in Britain.”

The British Big Cats Society receives between 300 and 500 sightings per year. “About 75 per cent of big cat sightings are of melanistic leopards [black panthers], 20 per cent are of pumas and probably five per cent are of lynx,” says environmental consultant, Rick Minter.

A self-described “knower, not a believer”, Minter is the authority on British big cats; author of Big Cats: Facing Britain’s Wild Predators, and host of the Big Cat Conversations podcast.

Minter hadn’t given the idea any thought until, gazing out of the window at a Cumbrian hotel 20 years ago, he saw a black creature walk across the field, around 100 metres away. “I assumed it was a dog, then I realised its elongated body and long tail were cat-like. I found myself rapidly thinking of alternatives to it being a black panther, but drew a blank.”

Though his family offered “heartfelt” resistance and advised him to keep an “orthodox” professional life in countryside management policy, Minter dived into the rabbit hole.