Right so I've been sitting on this for a few weeks now because I didn't want to sound like a complete nutter, but yeah - I've had two separate sightings near the Long Mynd in the past month or so.
First time I genuinely thought it was a large dog moving through the bracken. But the second time I had my trail cam set up (Browning Strike Force, nothing fancy) and caught what I can only describe as a very deliberate, low-slung movement that no dog does. That rolling shoulder gait. You know the one. Whatever it was, it wasn't small.
The footage is frustratingly dark and I've run it through a couple of basic stabilisation tools but there's no clean frame where you can make out a definitive shape. Story of my life honestly.
What's interesting is that Shropshire has a reasonably well-documented history of big cat reports going back decades - there's actually a decent cluster of sightings around the Welsh border corridor that people don't really talk about. The terrain makes perfect sense too. Plenty of cover, decent prey population, relatively low footfall on the quieter routes.
Has anyone else been out that way recently? Particularly interested if anyone's had sightings near Stiperstones or further south toward Clun Forest.
If you've got footage or even decent photographs, it'd be worth compiling them geographically - even rough grid references would help build a picture of whether this is one animal with a territory or multiple individuals.
