By Emily Parsons
Thursday, 16 May 2013
A lynx-like feline has been spotted skulking near a Carlisle footpath, it is claimed.
Summer and Paige McNeill
She said: “We were coming from Botcherby and walking towards the section known as the Arches near Harraby.
“As we walked around the corner this cat was sitting on the railway line looking at us.”
From a distance she did not notice anything unusual.
Mrs McNeill says she pointed out the creature to her four-year-old daughter, Summer.
It was only as the three got closer that her eldest daughter Paige, 11, commented on just how large it was.
Mrs McNeill continued: “I was a bit worried when we got closer and I realised just how big it really was.
“It was brown and about four times the size of a house cat.”
Paige was so fascinated by what she had seen that the first thing she did after school yesterday afternoon was to ask her mum to help look it up on the internet.
Mother and daughter looked at numerous images, and concluded it most closely resembled a lynx.
“I didn’t really know what to do about it,” Mrs McNeill admitted.
“I told my husband and he said I should really get it in the paper, to make other people aware.”
It is not the first big cat to be spotted in and around the city.
Last year Raymond Sant was driving from his home in Thursby towards Asda, Carlisle, when he got a glimpse of a strange creature in a wooded area beside the supermarket.
He told the News & Star at the time: “It looked to me very much like a panther. It was the size of a labrador, but wasn’t a labrador, and had a much longer tail.”
Large felines have also been reported in the Rockcliffe area, in Eastern Way, Carlisle, and around Shap and in the Eden Valley.
A spokesman for Cumbria police said the force had not received any reports of so-called big cats in the city.
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