'The beast of blue Bell Hill'....

On 22nd December 2013 at lunch-time a family were driving in the vicinity of the village of Boxley when a huge black cat crossed the road in front of them. The female witness stated that the animal was clearly a 'big cat' and not a domestic cat.

This animal has been seen infrequently over the last couple of years and is clearly not the same animal reported on in the 1920s a few miles from the spot of this recent sighting. Even so, what it proves is that such cats have been a round a lot longer than some people think and are not merely occasional releases from private collections and zoo parks and that there must be mating pairs.

In the late 1990s the so-called 'beast of Blue Bell Hill' came to the fore after hundreds of sightings around the old village which is situated between the Medway Towns and Maidstone but as leopards only live for between 12 and eighteen years the animal seen even in 1998 would most probably be on it's last legs by now or dead. There are too many sightings close together, from different areas of Kent for this to be just one roaming melanistic leopard, proof surely that there are breeding populations of these animals.