Did anyone else see a huge black cat near the Shropshire hills last week?

Spent 30-odd years driving through the night on routes all across England and Wales and I'll tell you, you see things in your headlights that the daylight crowd never get to witness. Big cats are real, full stop. The number of times I saw something cross the road that was absolutely not a dog or a fox, and far too big and low-slung to be anything domestic.

The Shropshire hills area doesn't surprise me at all. Plenty of cover, decent prey population, keeps itself well away from people. That's exactly the behaviour you'd expect from a melanistic leopard or a puma that's been out there a generation or two.

What time of day was the sighting? And roughly which part of the hills - Long Mynd area, or further toward Wenlock Edge? The details matter more than people think. Track width, gait, tail length relative to body. If anyone got a photo I'd really like to look at the pixel data properly before anyone starts crying "big dog."

@RetiredLonghaulTruckDriver I find the night hours thing really interesting actually, because a lot of the more credible big cat sightings do come from people in vehicles at night - lorry drivers, farmers doing early morning runs, that sort of thing. Less foot traffic, animals are more active, and headlights pick up eyeshine at distances you'd never notice in daylight. Shropshire and the surrounding border country has a pretty solid history of reports going back decades. Do you remember roughly what time it was and which direction the animal was moving? That kind of detail helps when you're trying to map movement corridors, which is something I've been loosely tracking for the north of England but the Shropshire data always seems thin compared to the actual sighting density.