Two members of the public spotted a big cat roaming fields between the Greyhound Retail Park and Blacon within 15 minutes of each other, on the night of Wednesday 12th February.
Simon Holliday was walking around the edge of Gorse Hill playing fields at around 10:15 PM when he heard a growl from the hedgerow. Turning to face it with a torch, he saw a 4ft-long cat “with a great big tail”, leaving both Simon and his dog “frozen in shock”.
After around 10 seconds “which seemed like a lifetime”, the animal turned and “bolted” away through the hedgerow. Reporting the sighting via this website after returning home, Simon told us: “As I type this I am shaking and my adrenaline is pumping.”
Also at 10:15 PM, Nathan Smith was finishing his shift at Asda and preparing to walk home. Passing through the “fields behind the store, near Gorse Hill” at around 10:30 PM, he heard a rustle and turned to see “a rather large black cat” which was “so long and muscular” just 10 metres away.
He froze in place as the creature darted away “like it didn’t want to be seen”, telling us: “I’ve worked there and walked home after every shift and seen foxes, small cats, dogs etc but never anything like this, it was so long and muscular, after a Google search it was definitely what looks to be a puma.”
The location of both encounters was given as Gorse Hill, which according to Devachat, ‘the voice of the city’, is a local name for the Clifton Drive area as the farm which once stood on the site was owned by a Mr Gorse.
Big cat sightings are now commonplace in the Chester area. In December, an Uber Eats driver took a photo of a massive black cat on Chester Meadows. Weeks later, Imogen and her puppy Scibo were shaken by a ‘deep growl’ coming from thick undergrowth at the same location.
Last month, a big cat was spotted overnight on Plas Newton Lane, close to Chester Zoo, and Cheshire Live have shared a video of a suspected big cat filmed near the Chester branch of the Shropshire Union Canal in early January.
Also in recent weeks, a worker spotted a big cat a few miles away, when a footprint was also found at Ince Marshes. Way back in 2011, someone called 999 after spotting a tiger roaming wild along the River Dee, and last week we shared a historical report from Kate, who spotted a panther roaming fields on the outskirts of Chester back in 2000.
