The Kellas Cats: Tomas Christie's Kellas male and the snared Revack cat

Long before 1984, people in the Scottish Highlands talked about big black cats. Sightings were dismissed as hoaxes or myth. Farmers and gamekeepers said otherwise. Then the specimens turned up.

January 1983. Local laird Tomas Christie was near the River Lossie, in the vicinity of the tiny village of Kellas in West Moray, when he observed a pair of black cats. He shot one. The other escaped unharmed. Christie had seen and shot other cats of this form before, and he decided to have this one preserved as a permanent exhibit. It was an adult male, complete with sparkling white guard hairs. Its head and body measured 26 in, with a further 12 in of tail.

June 1984. Within the grounds of Revack Lodge, on the Revack pheasant estate near Grantown-on-Spey, an adult male was caught in a fox snare. The lodge's gamekeeper, Ronald Douglas, found the dead body and brought it back to the lodge. Its appearance was so noteworthy that Highland Wildlife Park director Edward R.J. Orbell and local veterinary surgeon John Robertson were invited to view it. Orbell took photographs, one of them with the cat laid beside a measuring ruler.

The animal was gracile, with a slender body and seemingly lengthy limbs. Its pelage was dark and bristly, predominantly black but flecked all over with very long, gleaming white guard hairs. The upper canines projected from the mouth even when the jaws were closed. Darren Naish noted very large triangular ears and a fairly long snout, and gave a total length of 108 cm.

Douglas sent the cat to a taxidermist. Accounts differ on where. Then it seemingly vanished. Only the photographs survive.

According to Karl Shuker, the Forres Gazette broke the Revack story first. Christie realised his own specimen was the same type and came forward. On 3 October 1984 the paper was once again dominated by photographs of "a large, black, ferocious-looking cat". Early sceptics dismissed it as "a very large feral domestic cat". Farmers and gamekeepers replied that they had been shooting large black cats on Highland estates for years.

In late spring 1985, Daphne Hills of the Natural History Museum in London examined Christie's specimen. A hybrid or a feral domestic cat could not be totally ruled out, the report said, but it was most probably a melanistic Scottish wildcat.

On 22 May 1986, the BBC's Tomorrow's World set traps near Kellas and caught the first live specimen, a female. It went to the Highland Wildlife Park at Kincraig. A live male followed in 1988, caught in Inverness-shire. Both later passed to Di Francis, who bred them. Dr Andrew Kitchener of the National Museums of Scotland then studied eight specimens, seven of them supplied by Francis. Most were hybrids closer to the Scottish wildcat. One was a juvenile melanistic wildcat.

Shuker named the Kellas cat and, in Mystery Cats of the World (1989), predicted it would prove to be a domestic and wildcat hybrid. His 2021 summary was blunt. In every case, the specimen was concluded to be a domestic cat x Scottish wildcat hybrid. Today the Kellas cat is seen as a feline curiosity rather than a new species. It may even have inspired the cat-sìth, the large black fairy cat of Highland folklore. For a mystery cat, it ended unusually. Bodies, photographs and a museum report. And still one missing mount.