AN UNIDENTIFIED large black animal, which is believed to be the mysterious big black cat, was spotted in Ingleton by holidaymakers.

Jessica Varley, 37, who lives outside Huddersfield, stayed overnight at the Marton Arm's with her husband and took a walk before breakfast along Far Westhouse the following morning.

The couple, regular visitors to the area, followed the road until they approached a bend, where they were met by a large black creature with ‘bright round eyes.’

“We first thought it was a fox, something like that. Then we realised it couldn’t possibly be a fox. It was really, really black”, Mrs Varley said. “Then we thought it might have been a badger but then we realised that the reason why we thought that was because of the colour, it was so black.”

The animal, described as cat like but ‘much larger than a domestic cat’ had paused and stared at the couple before running off into a small thicket of bushes on the left of the road.

“We thought it might have been a cat because of the eyes”, Mrs Varley said. “They were so round and bright, the way they stared at us.”

The couple did not have time to photograph the animal before it jumped into bushes and later when retracing their tracks it was nowhere to be found.

After the couple got back home they were curious to find out whether others had seen the mystery animal and found The Westmorland Gazette story from 2008 about a black cat sighting in Ingleton.

“We thought that maybe someone else might have seen it,” she said. “There is quite a lot of livestock that something like that could eat quite happily, it could be easy for something like that to survive.”

In December 2008 John Allan took pictures of the snowy paw prints of ‘a non-domestic’ feline, which he saw sitting on the village football field.

At the time Mr Allan described the creature ‘a huge black cat’ which was a couple of feet tall and about four or five feet long, with a tail ‘as long as its body’.

Over the years The Westmorland Gazette has had reported sightings of the black cat across South Lakeland and the Dales county, with the latest reported sighting this August at Ormside, near Appleby.