“BEWARE THE BEAST WITHIN!”
– Tall tales of the Cornish ‘Big cat’.
First presented to The Folklore societies - Beasts in legend and tradition conference at Paignton Zoo Sept 7th, 2013.
Some years ago (during the mid-1990s) I was attending a college course in Falmouth. During a coffee break I happened to mention a large bullet which I noticed a fellow student was sporting on her key ring. In response to which, a look came over her which will be familiar to those of us who have ever investigated strange or anomalous phenomena; it was a look that embodied a desire to talk and a desire not to talk, a desire to remember and a desire to forget …all in equal measure. She then went on to recount this most extraordinary story. It was the first time I had ever come across a first-hand account of the legendary “Beast of Bodmin Moor”.
She told me that her family were farmers on Bodmin Moor. The trouble started when they noticed that the stock were getting ‘spooked’ by something at night … then some of the stock started to go missing. Then one night whilst investigating the sheep, who were acting in an unusually agitated manner at the lower end of one of the fields, she heard, issuing from a nearby dark thicket, a long low feline growl. From this moment forth the family were terrified to go out at night without a gun. At a loss as to what to do they called in the man from M.A.F.F. On his arrival he informed them that without a shadow of a doubt there was no mythical beast of Bodmin or any such big cat loose in the countryside …but if by chance they did see it they were not to shoot it with a .22 bullet or a shotgun, that would not penetrate its hide and would only annoy it, they must use nothing smaller than a 306 bullet …which is what she carried on her key ring as a reminder.
There were many aspects of this tale that intrigued me, not least the man from M.A.F.Fs bizarre contradictory take on the subject. The reason for this she informed me was simple, M.A.F.F were over a barrel! They were unable to do anything about the problem. There were many big game hunters in the world, but none were able to track in our own native terrain.
I had always been aware of the stories of anomalous big cats in our countryside. I was brought up not far from the now famous “Surrey puma” sightings of the early 1960s, but oddly the big cat always seemed to evade my attention. Conceptually it seemed to fall between the boards; quite simply I didn’t know what to do with it. Was it a Folkloric, a psychological, a magical or a cryptozoological phenomenon? Paradoxically it is this liminality of its nature which is a pervasive theme that weaves its way through the natural history of the beast. It slinks between worlds defying definition from whichever method of enquiry that comes its way… But the fact still remains …it is real. The only question is - in what kind of reality does it exist?
Several months later however I had my first encounter with the beast myself. I was living in the village of Constantine. One evening I went for a walk in the woods, as the light began to fade I climbed an old granite spoil heap at the entrance to the woods to see if I could see the sunset. On the far side of the field to the east however I saw a strange shape moving along the line of the hedge. It was as black as pitch and moved with an unearthly fluid motion. At first I was not sure as to whether it was a living creature or not, but as it reached the end of the hedge line I could make out a distinct feline form about the size of a large Labrador with a long flowing tail.
As is typical of many such encounters, in itself it is never a neatly formed narrative with a beginning middle and end, and there is even more rarely ever a backstory or any form of resolution … All we have is just an isolated chance encounter with the unknowable, and to further obfuscate the issue, one never reacts to an otherworldly anomalous phenomenon in the way on thinks one would react when looking back in the cold light of day. Sometimes a primal fear wells up …a reflexive fear that comes from not from the mind but from the body. Sometimes the most extraordinary experience can seem quite mundane at the time and it is only in retrospect that its actual significance hits us with a thrilling shock. Sometimes we mould our perception of the uncanny in to something every day and familiar, leaving it camouflaged and unseen amidst the clutter of our everyday lives, but most often we refuse to see it at all. But if by chance it broaches these limitations of our perception and enters our consciousness, we consign it to a discrete compartment of our minds, bringing it out only now and then like a precious gift (as did the woman from Bodmin Moor) for the scrutiny of the world. This is hardly surprising! For maybe these kinds of experiences speak to a different hidden primordial part of our mind. It is this liminality in its nature that makes the beast both impossible to investigate and a rich seam from which the folklorist may mine...
My own encounter I too kept to myself and kept it safe in that peculiar mental compartment reserved for such things. To my surprise however, within a few days a friend in the village reported seeing a similar creature as he cut over the fields to the pub one night. Their then continued a steady flow of reports of sightings of the beast which continued from the mid-1990s up until the late naughties. One friend saw it clearly as it jumped from behind the electrical substation in front of his vehicle one night …and he is still haunted by the sight of its eyes shining in his headlights. Another friend saw it again clearly at night on the Goonhilly road. I also came across two separate accounts by people who had come across the characteristic smell of big cat scent in the woods around Constantine, of which they had hitherto only come across before in the forests of Africa and Asia. In the mid naughties the farmer on the farm on which I was living on at the time saw it in broad day light whilst out walking the dogs with her grandson. The dogs curiously ignored it whilst it slunk away. Being of that generation that has a literary quote for all occasions on her return she described the encounter with a quote from Browning that to me epitomises in so many ways the nature of the beast; it was “An apparition, a moment’s ornament”.
The most curious story however came from another farmer who lived over the hill in the northern end of the parish. I had heard he had seen the beast, but sometimes it is difficult to broach the subject and I did not get to question him on the matter until some years later. One day whilst I was working cutting footpaths I happened across farmer L in the lane. He was an old-school Cornish farmer who lived in a tumbled down granite cottage. In his broad Cornish brogue, liberally peppered with “F…s” and “C…s” he told me the following most extraordinary story. One day he came across a big cat with a long tail, about the size of a large dog sunning itself on a rock on the far side of the valley. So of he went to get his gun, but unfortunately he had no ammunition as previously the police had gone around confiscating guns and ammunition from farmers during the foot and mouth crisis of the early naughty’s. So off he goes to his cousin, but he too had no ammunition. He went up to the rock and there still the cat was lying. Once again he went off to another neighbour and he too had no ammunition. Still at the end of the day the beast was still on the rock. There was nothing left to do than to go home. So thanks to M.A.F.Fs heavy handed mishandling of the foot and mouth epidemic the beast slunk off in to the night to live another day. After hearing this strange tale the obvious question that came to mind was “why did you want to shoot it?”, to which he replied that he wanted to nail it to the door of ‘radio Cornwall’ … then everybody would know that the beast was real!
Without doubt the beast exists as an observable phenomenon, but the question is, what kind of phenomenon is it? The first port of call has to be the cryptozoological approach. Is it a living beast of fur, flesh and blood? Big cats do live in the wild in Africa, Asia and South America. During the last ice age, next to humans the lion was one of the most ubiquitous mammals on the planet, inhabiting every continent including Northern Europe. The two questions we need to ask are: could big cats live in our environment? And could they live unseen under our very noses? (Lee Ramsay, Cardiff- speaking at the same conference, presented a paper on the beaver, which was supposed to have been made extinct in Britain in the C13 but seems to turn up under different names up until the C18) I believe the answer to both these questions is yes! Some have suggested they are big cats released from captivity that have naturalised in the wild, whilst Di Francis- researcher in to the Exmore big cat, suggest it may be a survival of the old prehistoric cats that haunted the caves of Europe in the upper Palaeolithic. This of course begs the question – why is there no material evidence? The answer to this is simply that there is! There have been an enormous number of cats shot, trapped, stuffed, photographed and filmed. Four sculls have been found on Exmore along with numerous samples of prints and spore. Another tale I heard from a gentleman who is now a headmaster, is that in his youth he worked for a tannery in the Mid Cornwall aria that supplied leather for a large shoe manufacturer. He recalled how often clients would bring private jobs round to the back door. One such client was a local trapper who regularly used to bring in big cat skins. Maybe the question one needs to ask is not as to whether the cat exists, but why do we so vociferously beat our perceptions on the head with after-the-fact rationality and cling to our disbelief in its existence? The psychologist Leon Festinger put forward the theory that, far from being rational beings we adopt the beliefs, knowledge and perceptions that make us comfortable and reject that which we consider to be less attractive. Thus our thought process is aesthetic and ideological rather than objective and rational. This process he called “cognitive dissonance”. Thus it is not a case of “seeing is believing” but “believing is seeing”... If it is important to us as a culture to know the beast is their but not to see it, then we will bend our thoughts and perceptions to the ends of the earth to accommodate this belief.
She told me that her family were farmers on Bodmin Moor. The trouble started when they noticed that the stock were getting ‘spooked’ by something at night … then some of the stock started to go missing. Then one night whilst investigating the sheep, who were acting in an unusually agitated manner at the lower end of one of the fields, she heard, issuing from a nearby dark thicket, a long low feline growl. From this moment forth the family were terrified to go out at night without a gun. At a loss as to what to do they called in the man from M.A.F.F. On his arrival he informed them that without a shadow of a doubt there was no mythical beast of Bodmin or any such big cat loose in the countryside …but if by chance they did see it they were not to shoot it with a .22 bullet or a shotgun, that would not penetrate its hide and would only annoy it, they must use nothing smaller than a 306 bullet …which is what she carried on her key ring as a reminder.
There were many aspects of this tale that intrigued me, not least the man from M.A.F.Fs bizarre contradictory take on the subject. The reason for this she informed me was simple, M.A.F.F were over a barrel! They were unable to do anything about the problem. There were many big game hunters in the world, but none were able to track in our own native terrain.
I had always been aware of the stories of anomalous big cats in our countryside. I was brought up not far from the now famous “Surrey puma” sightings of the early 1960s, but oddly the big cat always seemed to evade my attention. Conceptually it seemed to fall between the boards; quite simply I didn’t know what to do with it. Was it a Folkloric, a psychological, a magical or a cryptozoological phenomenon? Paradoxically it is this liminality of its nature which is a pervasive theme that weaves its way through the natural history of the beast. It slinks between worlds defying definition from whichever method of enquiry that comes its way… But the fact still remains …it is real. The only question is - in what kind of reality does it exist?
Several months later however I had my first encounter with the beast myself. I was living in the village of Constantine. One evening I went for a walk in the woods, as the light began to fade I climbed an old granite spoil heap at the entrance to the woods to see if I could see the sunset. On the far side of the field to the east however I saw a strange shape moving along the line of the hedge. It was as black as pitch and moved with an unearthly fluid motion. At first I was not sure as to whether it was a living creature or not, but as it reached the end of the hedge line I could make out a distinct feline form about the size of a large Labrador with a long flowing tail.
As is typical of many such encounters, in itself it is never a neatly formed narrative with a beginning middle and end, and there is even more rarely ever a backstory or any form of resolution … All we have is just an isolated chance encounter with the unknowable, and to further obfuscate the issue, one never reacts to an otherworldly anomalous phenomenon in the way on thinks one would react when looking back in the cold light of day. Sometimes a primal fear wells up …a reflexive fear that comes from not from the mind but from the body. Sometimes the most extraordinary experience can seem quite mundane at the time and it is only in retrospect that its actual significance hits us with a thrilling shock. Sometimes we mould our perception of the uncanny in to something every day and familiar, leaving it camouflaged and unseen amidst the clutter of our everyday lives, but most often we refuse to see it at all. But if by chance it broaches these limitations of our perception and enters our consciousness, we consign it to a discrete compartment of our minds, bringing it out only now and then like a precious gift (as did the woman from Bodmin Moor) for the scrutiny of the world. This is hardly surprising! For maybe these kinds of experiences speak to a different hidden primordial part of our mind. It is this liminality in its nature that makes the beast both impossible to investigate and a rich seam from which the folklorist may mine...
My own encounter I too kept to myself and kept it safe in that peculiar mental compartment reserved for such things. To my surprise however, within a few days a friend in the village reported seeing a similar creature as he cut over the fields to the pub one night. Their then continued a steady flow of reports of sightings of the beast which continued from the mid-1990s up until the late naughties. One friend saw it clearly as it jumped from behind the electrical substation in front of his vehicle one night …and he is still haunted by the sight of its eyes shining in his headlights. Another friend saw it again clearly at night on the Goonhilly road. I also came across two separate accounts by people who had come across the characteristic smell of big cat scent in the woods around Constantine, of which they had hitherto only come across before in the forests of Africa and Asia. In the mid naughties the farmer on the farm on which I was living on at the time saw it in broad day light whilst out walking the dogs with her grandson. The dogs curiously ignored it whilst it slunk away. Being of that generation that has a literary quote for all occasions on her return she described the encounter with a quote from Browning that to me epitomises in so many ways the nature of the beast; it was “An apparition, a moment’s ornament”.
The most curious story however came from another farmer who lived over the hill in the northern end of the parish. I had heard he had seen the beast, but sometimes it is difficult to broach the subject and I did not get to question him on the matter until some years later. One day whilst I was working cutting footpaths I happened across farmer L in the lane. He was an old-school Cornish farmer who lived in a tumbled down granite cottage. In his broad Cornish brogue, liberally peppered with “F…s” and “C…s” he told me the following most extraordinary story. One day he came across a big cat with a long tail, about the size of a large dog sunning itself on a rock on the far side of the valley. So of he went to get his gun, but unfortunately he had no ammunition as previously the police had gone around confiscating guns and ammunition from farmers during the foot and mouth crisis of the early naughty’s. So off he goes to his cousin, but he too had no ammunition. He went up to the rock and there still the cat was lying. Once again he went off to another neighbour and he too had no ammunition. Still at the end of the day the beast was still on the rock. There was nothing left to do than to go home. So thanks to M.A.F.Fs heavy handed mishandling of the foot and mouth epidemic the beast slunk off in to the night to live another day. After hearing this strange tale the obvious question that came to mind was “why did you want to shoot it?”, to which he replied that he wanted to nail it to the door of ‘radio Cornwall’ … then everybody would know that the beast was real!
Without doubt the beast exists as an observable phenomenon, but the question is, what kind of phenomenon is it? The first port of call has to be the cryptozoological approach. Is it a living beast of fur, flesh and blood? Big cats do live in the wild in Africa, Asia and South America. During the last ice age, next to humans the lion was one of the most ubiquitous mammals on the planet, inhabiting every continent including Northern Europe. The two questions we need to ask are: could big cats live in our environment? And could they live unseen under our very noses? (Lee Ramsay, Cardiff- speaking at the same conference, presented a paper on the beaver, which was supposed to have been made extinct in Britain in the C13 but seems to turn up under different names up until the C18) I believe the answer to both these questions is yes! Some have suggested they are big cats released from captivity that have naturalised in the wild, whilst Di Francis- researcher in to the Exmore big cat, suggest it may be a survival of the old prehistoric cats that haunted the caves of Europe in the upper Palaeolithic. This of course begs the question – why is there no material evidence? The answer to this is simply that there is! There have been an enormous number of cats shot, trapped, stuffed, photographed and filmed. Four sculls have been found on Exmore along with numerous samples of prints and spore. Another tale I heard from a gentleman who is now a headmaster, is that in his youth he worked for a tannery in the Mid Cornwall aria that supplied leather for a large shoe manufacturer. He recalled how often clients would bring private jobs round to the back door. One such client was a local trapper who regularly used to bring in big cat skins. Maybe the question one needs to ask is not as to whether the cat exists, but why do we so vociferously beat our perceptions on the head with after-the-fact rationality and cling to our disbelief in its existence? The psychologist Leon Festinger put forward the theory that, far from being rational beings we adopt the beliefs, knowledge and perceptions that make us comfortable and reject that which we consider to be less attractive. Thus our thought process is aesthetic and ideological rather than objective and rational. This process he called “cognitive dissonance”. Thus it is not a case of “seeing is believing” but “believing is seeing”... If it is important to us as a culture to know the beast is their but not to see it, then we will bend our thoughts and perceptions to the ends of the earth to accommodate this belief.
