‘THE BRITISH TYGER’ - Roger Bingham reviews the history of Lakeland’s wild cats

RECENT reports that the discovery of two wild cat kittens, in Scotland, has brought the number of the British ‘Felis catus’ up to 19 and highlights the decline of a species, which was once common in Lakeland.

Traditionally, they inhabited isolated mountain areas. According to James Clarke’s Survey of the Lakes, of 1774, they were prolific near Keswick ‘where Catt-gill and Catt-cragg are so named from the catts that inhabit them’.

In particular, they seemed to be well suited to limestone crags where the clints and grykes, for instance near Coniston and on Farleton Knott, provided safe haunts for them to be ‘very destructive of game and occasionally of lambs’.

Cowper’s History of Hawkshead of 1772 noted ‘in grey rocks and in tracts preserved entirely for sheep wild cats inhabit in too great plenty’.

Throughout the district, churchwardens’ accounts of payments for catching vermin reveal the widespread existence of ‘catts’.

To the east they abounded at Shap, Orton and, also, at Appleby where between around 1649 and 1700 wild cats brought a shilling a head.

In Kendal the going rate was cheaper as the Parish Book itemised in 1703 ‘Dec. 27 to Anthony Wilson for one Wild Catt head £0, 0s, 4d’.

About the same time the Rev Thomas Machell reported ‘plenty of wild cats’ at Selside, Witherslack and, in Lunesdale, at Middleton, Barbon, Casterton and Kirkby Lonsdale.

Often cats were included in mixed hauls. In 1609 Heversham Wardens paid ‘Anthony Johnson for a fox head, 4 catts and two brocks 2s 10d. At Beetham Machell listed them along with ‘goats, martes (pole cats), brocks, foxes and black vipers’, while at Burton and Holme there were ‘foul and clean martes, wild catts: too many all over’.

Perhaps the largest haul was that of 12 wild cats, chronicled by Clarke, as having been ‘killed in the neighbourhood of Ullswater at Whitsun week 1759’.

He also described the cats as being of ‘one colour – grey with black strokes across the back; the largest are near the size of a fox and are the fiercest and most daring of creatures; they seem to be of the kind of a tiger and seize their prey in the same manner’.

Though rather like a large, bushy-tailed pussy cat or a small lynx, naturalist James Pennant in around 1780 also acclaimed them as ‘tygers’. Moreover, he reckoned them as being ‘three or four times as large as the common cat and more than a match for a single dog’.

Even a probably immature wild cat killed near Loweswater was said to weigh 17 pounds. But excavated wild cat bones indicated that they could have grown up to be 30 pounds.

In any event our local ‘catts’, despite their historic durability, seemed to have fizzled out by the mid 19th century and the last reported local catch in around 1870 was deemed to be a hoax.

Nevertheless, lingering memories might be behind periodic reports of the appearance of ‘big’ or ‘black cats’.

Yet even if modern speculations are disregarded Lakeland’s ‘tygers’ are not mythical but are part of our well recorded natural history.