The Beast of Exmoor

The full file

Reports of a large cat on Exmoor, the moorland that straddles north Devon and west Somerset, go back to the early 1970s. They stayed local until 1983, when sheep losses near South Molton, on the Devon edge of the moor, made the story national and Royal Marines were sent onto the hills. No animal was found then, and none has been caught since.

What was reported

A farmer near South Molton reported more than a hundred sheep killed over about three months, their throats torn, and the Daily Express offered a reward for video footage. Of what followed, The Week (2014) says Royal Marines snipers watched the hills for three nights before the Ministry of Defence ended the search, fearing they might shoot one of the amateur photographers on the same hunt. The Observer (2019) says only that a team of Marines was deployed and failed to catch a cat. Both were written decades later and cite no official document; popular claims of a six-month deployment have no reliable support.

Few witnesses are on record. According to The Week, after the search ended the Express reported that its only witness was a 16-year-old girl being driven to work, who said of the animal: "It was black and had a long tail." In her book on the beast, Di Francis told of a Marine sniper who had the animal in his sights but did not fire because he judged it out of range; pacing it out afterwards, he found it had been well within range. Retelling it in 2001, the Guardian concluded the animal was probably smaller and closer than he thought.

The evidence and where it is held

No body, bone or hair from 1983 is known to exist; what survives is paper. The North Devon Record Office, part of the South West Heritage Trust, holds a 1983 file of correspondence about the Daily Express article on the beast, among the papers of Bishop's Nympton parish, next door to South Molton. The Week says that tracks found at the time were believed by the authorities to be a panther's; only that one source makes the claim.

The modern record is a police one. In 2025, in answer to a freedom of information request reported that May, Devon and Cornwall Police released the incident entries for big-cat reports in the two counties since January 2021: thirteen, in which officers went out in person six times. One of them was a November 2021 call from South Molton reporting a lion; the zoos were checked. LBC reports that every big cat was accounted for, while Totnes Today's text says Exmoor Zoo reported "lions on the loose", which looks like a dropped "no".

The one carcass offered as the beast was not a cat. In January 2009 a decomposing animal washed up on Croyde beach in north Devon, and national newspapers suggested it might be the Beast of Exmoor. From the skull and a flipper recovered by the Centre for Fortean Zoology, the zoologist Darren Naish identified it as a grey seal. The Week later wrote that tissue samples had shown it to be a seal; Naish's identification rests on skull anatomy, not DNA.

What investigators concluded

No official inquiry into the Exmoor killings themselves has been found. The nearest is the Ministry of Agriculture's 1995 investigation of the Beast of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, carried out by the consultancy ADAS. In the Commons in February 1998 Elliot Morley, parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture, summarised its findings: the photographs and video showed domestic cats, the footprints were those of cats and dogs, and no livestock death that was followed up showed signs of a big cat. He added that none of the ministry's investigations had produced "any firm evidence of the existence of big cats living in the wild". In 2019 the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs told the Observer that neither it nor Natural England had received credible reports of wild-living or breeding big cats.

The conventional explanation

The leading explanation is misidentification: domestic cats and dogs seen at a distance that cannot be judged, with sheep killed by dogs or scavenged after death by foxes, badgers and crows. Its strength is that it has been tested where it could be. At Bodmin, investigators photographed a gatepost in a well-known "beast" picture with a one-metre ranging pole beside it, and the cat shrank to about 30 centimetres at the shoulder. At Woodchester Park in Gloucestershire in 2012, the University of Warwick ran 450 PCR tests on samples from a roe-deer carcass thought to be a big-cat kill, and from a second deer found nearby, and found fox DNA and no cat DNA. Its weakness is that none of this was done on Exmoor in 1983, and real escapes happen: Morley told the Commons that sixteen big cats had escaped since 1977, two of them staying free for more than a day, among them a puma captured near Inverness in 1980.

What remains unexplained or disputed

What killed the 1983 sheep has never been settled, because no published examination of the carcasses exists. Who ordered the Marines out, for how long and on what authority is not confirmed by any government record found here. The 1983 correspondence in the North Devon file is catalogued but not described. What the record does not show, on Exmoor or anywhere else in Britain, is a breeding population of big cats.

Sources

• House of Commons debate, Big Cats (Norfolk), 2 February 1998, cols 820–824 (archived) — Hansard, 1998. The Bodmin findings, the sixteen escapes since 1977 and the 1980 puma, in the minister's words.
• Correspondence concerning Daily Express article on the Beast of Exmoor, ref. 596 - 8/68/1-7 (archived) — North Devon Record Office, via The National Archives Discovery catalogue, 1983. Where the 1983 paper record is held.
• The mystery of Britain's alien big cats (archived) — The Week Staff, The Week, 2014. The sheep losses, the Express reward and witness, the three-night sniper watch and the panther-track claim.
• On the trail of Britain's wild big cats — Mark Wilding, The Observer, 2019. The Marines' deployment after more than 100 sheep deaths, the 1995 Bodmin finding and Defra's position.
• It's a lion... no it's a cat — David Hambling, The Guardian, 2001. Di Francis's account of the Marine sniper and how badly people judge size and distance.
• England 'does a Montauk' (archived) — Darren Naish, Tetrapod Zoology, 2009. The Croyde carcass identified as a grey seal from its skull.
• Cat's out of the bag? (archived) — David Clarke, Sheffield Hallam University folklorist, 2014. The ADAS method at Bodmin, including the ranging-pole photographs.
• Research into possible Woodchester wild cat finds no cat DNA on deer (archived) — University of Warwick and National Trust, 2012. The 45 samples and 450 PCRs that found fox DNA and no cat DNA.
• Panthers, pumas and 'lion-like' beasts: police reports reveal wave of UK big cat sightings (archived) — LBC, 2025. The 2025 police disclosure: thirteen reports since 2021, the South Molton "lion" and the zoo checks.
• Are big cats roaming free in Devon and Cornwall? (archived) — Totnes Today, 2025. The same disclosure in a second report, including its Exmoor Zoo wording.