A woman and her boyfriend were enjoying a “random” trip to Moel Famau in the dead of night when they found themselves fleeing from a “huge” cat, with the woman telling Puma Watch: “I’d never ran so fast in my life!”
The encounter with the animal, which she suspects could have been a puma, occurred at around 3 AM in the early hours of Monday 27th August 2019.
The witness, who provided their name to Puma Watch but asked to remain anonymous, told us: “It was a bank holiday and me and my boyfriend decided randomly to go to Moel Famau early hours in the morning.
“We brought torches on the way, because it was a bank holiday and about 3am there was no one else there at all, no cars or people.
“We got up about halfway up from the car park where you come across the little fence gate and its open field, we shone our torches and froze.
“There was loads of eyes looking at us, presuming they was sheep, but one stood out. It was standing up where the others were lying down. It looked right at us.
“All I can remember is its eyes were close(ish) together, its ears were pointing up and its a big cat-like tail. It definitely wasn’t a sheep, looked more cat-like, but huge.
“We ran back down, never ran so fast in my life, paranoid it was chasing us.
“Never forget that random night. Got no pictures as was too scared couldn’t tell the colour as it was dark.”
Big cats such as pumas are solitary with a hunting range of dozens of miles. They’re mostly spotted in Snowdonia and the Clwydian hills but reports of sightings in urban locations some distance from these areas are becoming more frequent.
Dozens of sightings have occurred in Flintshire since the summer, with many happening on Halkyn Mountain or near Pontybodkin – both just a few miles from Moel Famau – and one was spotted nearby in Mold just last week. Big cats have also been reported in Connah’s Quay.
As seen with Llandundo’s now-famous goats, who have taken to roaming the town’s deserted streets during the coronavirus lockdowns, it’s likely that the reduced levels of human activity over the last year is encouraging big cats to roam further from the hills into more populated areas.
When big cats were banned as pets in the 1970s, it was legal to release them into the countryside to avoid expensive rehoming costs. Owners from across the UK travelled to areas like Wales to release their cats in the remote environment, where small but significant populations have thrived ever since.
Moel Famau image 1 © John S Turner (cc-by-sa/2.0)
Black cat image by Steve Wilson under CC-BY-2.0.