The Fen Tiger: the Cottenham big cat and William Rooker's film

Britain has a long tradition of phantom cats. The Beast of Bodmin. The Beast of Exmoor. Among them sits a black animal from the Cambridgeshire Fens that came to be called the Fen Tiger. The name has a double life. "Fen Tigers" is also the traditional nickname for the Fen people themselves.

1982. Near the village of Cottenham, Cambridgeshire, a big cat was reported. That is almost all that survives. No witness name. No day or month. No account of size, colour or gait has come down through the later retellings. Some versions reach further back. One account speaks of a jet-black cat reported in Cambridgeshire in 1978. Another says the first sightings date to "the late 1970s, early 1980s". Then nothing. For twelve years, no reports.

1994. William Rooker was in a field near Cottenham, reportedly near the Oakington Road. He captured what he believed to be the tiger on camera. The clip is described as showing "a fairly big black cat roaming a field". One account says it runs for around two minutes and calls it "the best video footage to date". The British Big Cat Society reportedly told the BBC it showed "what is almost certainly a large cat-like animal". No online copy of Rooker's film has been located.

The sightings returned. In 1995 Martin J Pickering, then 16, was riding a 50cc motorbike with a friend on a fen road near Rampton, between Cottenham and Willingham. He later recalled "a big black panther, looking right at us." "It was clearly feline," he said. Then it bounded away. He is now developing a horror film, Claws, based on the encounter.

July 1998 brought the first official police report, from Ely. An animal "too big to be an ordinary cat". Between 1998 and 2010, Cambridgeshire Police logged 63 calls about mysterious creatures. Cottenham was on the list again, alongside Landbeach, Histon, Ely, Soham, St Ives and Peterborough. At Tydd St Giles, Mark and Jane Burton saw something black, "larger than an Alsatian". "It froze and we froze." A goose was later found with its head removed.

In 2011, Shepreth Wildlife Park sent investigators and cameras after four sightings within 10 miles of Royston and Melbourn. They found no evidence. The national position of DEFRA is blunt: "Neither Natural England nor Defra have received any credible reports of wild living or breeding big cats in Britain in recent years".

Members of the British Big Cat Society suggested the Fen Tiger was "either a tiger or a puma" released by an owner who had bought it illegally. Sceptics point to a simpler culprit. Distant sightings are often domestic cats close to the observer, misjudged as larger animals further away. When a black cat was filmed at Baston in 2019, Dr Luke Hunter of the Wildlife Conservation Society said he was "100 per cent certain it's a moggie". Paul Westwood of Big Cat Monitors kept the door open: "It is quite possible that there are big cats in Cambridgeshire."

No hoax claim has ever been made against Rooker's film or the 1982 report. No proof has surfaced either. The Fen Tiger lives on in phone photos taken near Ely Cathedral, in a cat "about the size of a Labrador" seen behind Abbotsley golf club, and in every new call to the police. It began near Cottenham. It has never quite gone away.