The Strange Topography of Big Cat Sightings - Merrily Harpur - Megalithomania 2007 - Audio Only

The Strange Topography of Big Cat Sightings, presented by Merrilee Harper. In this lecture Merrilee examines the strange link between significant topographical features in the megalithic landscape and the fleeting appearances of these mysterious beasts, recorded live at Megalithomania Conference 2007. Hello, this talk is about anomalous big cats and I'm going to call them ABCs for short. They are the biggest mystery stalking the landscape at the moment. They first came to the notice of the media in the 1960s with sightings of the Surrey Puma and in the 40 years since the annual number of sightings has increased hugely. It's now running at somewhere between two and five thousand a year. It's an astonishing thing to see what is unmistakably a big cat in the English countryside. Kim Welsh for instance had just such an encounter on a Hampshire lane like that. She's a teacher and a wife and a mother and on a bright morning in May 2001 she was driving her daughter home from a riding lesson near Ringwood in Hampshire. They'd gone only about 250 yards out of the village when they had an experience which Kim described as completely bizarre. That's what she said about it in fact. They came around a bend to see a huge jet black cat like a panther emerge from the left hand side hedge and stop in the middle of the lane. They looked at each other in stunned silence. The car was a Nissan Serena of just over five foot six inches wide and the ABC was apparently at least the whole width of the car. Kim rang the police and returned to the riding stable to warn them and they confirmed that other people had seen a similar animal in the area. Next slide. That's Sam Cook and that's what happened to him in June 2005. He'd gone out to call his dog in and found it staring tensely at the marsh at the bottom of a steep bank at the edge of their garden which you could see the very steep bank. Next slide please. Those are two of my neighbours in Ireland. Clodagh Compton on the right was sunbathing on the patio and her mother Linda was inside but rushed out at Clodagh's yell and they were both shocked to see a cat like animal slightly bigger than one of their sheep slouching across the lawn. Linda called her husband and they all searched but the creature was never seen again. Thousands of people have this kind of experience every year and in every county from Caithness to Cornwall and from Norfolk to Wales. In fact a glimpse of an ABC is now Britain's commonest brush with the unknown. More people have now seen a mysterious big cat in the countryside than have ever seen a pig. Can you spot the deliberate mistake there? However, you might wonder what they've got to do with megalithomania. The fact is that the more you know about ABCs the more they seem to draw attention to a mysterious and dynamic aspect of landscape in the same way that megaliths do or might do. It's not just that the idea of strange big cats hidden within it infuses the landscape with numerosity and by all accounts an encounter with a big cat in an English country lane is a shocking and thrilling event. But I hope to show that the topography of the landscape itself may have something to do with generating appearances of these mysterious animals. This may sound far-fetched to most people who assume that British big cats are simply the descendants of animals escaped from zoos or which were released from private collections when the Dangerous Wild Animals Act of 1976 made them expensive to keep. However, this is not what they are and I will explain why. Firstly, I should say there are at present four species of big cats known to science. Lions and tigers. Tiger, lion. Oh, sorry. Back again. That's it. And then on the right there's a pumas. And that's a leopard. And that's a black leopard. Leopards come in two colours. Spotted, which is the normal coat. Next slide, please. And black, which is rare. Top two obviously are spotted and the bottom are black. Actually, those are jaguars. The popular term for a melanistic leopard, i.e. one which has been born with black fur, is a black panther. That's just simply a leopard with black fur. And I will use this term for a black leopard as well. Now, in the 1970s, it was relatively cheap to buy some big cats. A zoo-bred lion cub or a puma could be bought for £20, for instance. But black panthers were always rare and therefore expensive. In 1976, when the Dangerous Wild Animals Act came in, anyone who owned one could have sold it for £500, which was the cost of a small car, the equivalent of about £6,000 or £7,000 today. There's no evidence that irresponsible owners did release big cats in any numbers, but it's reasonable to assume that if the owner of a menagerie had decided to offload some of his big cats, he would have released the cheaper, less dangerous common pumas or ordinary spotted leopards into the wild while keeping back the valuable black leopard to sell on. And yet, if the present sighting statistics are anything to go by, he did the exact reverse. In the UK, every year, there are approximately 500 sightings of animals broadly resembling brown or fawn-coloured pumas. But there are between 2,000 and 5,000 sightings of black panther-like animals. And the really bizarre thing is that among the thousands of big cat sightings of the past 40 years, no witness has ever reported seeing a normal spotted leopard. Another theory is that our big cats could have escaped from menageries in the past and perhaps bred in the wild. Travelling menageries were certainly popular in the 19th century. The drawback to the theory is that, just with the releases theory, there's no evidence for it. Escapees are easily recaptured. And those which are not immediately rounded up do not scamper off to live romantically in the forest like Robin Hood. On the contrary, they usually come back home for dinner by themselves. For instance, in August 1975, an escaped leopard was easily caught when it obligingly wandered inside a house in Fallowfield, Manchester. A puma escaped from a shed in Hampshire and strolled aimlessly around the village gardens for a few hours before being recaptured. In fact, of the 16 big cats known to have escaped into the wild in the UK between 1977 and 1998, 14 were recaptured within 24 hours and the remaining two were shot. Given the huge number of sightings, it's a curious fact that none of these black panther-like animals has ever been caught, despite dozens of police hunts over the decades. That's the hunt for what became known as the Shooter's Hill Cheetah. It was black actually, but cheetahs aren't, in East London and it was the biggest on record. Hundreds of people helped the police with tracker dogs and so forth, but to no avail. In recent years, police hunts have called upon helicopters equipped with thermal imaging equipment. Farmers have staged vigils. Gun clubs have staked out woodlands and numerous people have set traps over the years, but all without success. Strange thing is that it's actually quite easy to catch a big cat. They regularly shoot pumas in America, as you can see. They chase them up trees with dogs and they shoot them. The same goes with leopard shooting in Namibia. Those are South American people killing jaguars. You can see there's a wide range of opportunities for doing it. Spears, lassos, traps. Baited lures and so forth. Though it shouldn't be a problem, it's easy elsewhere, but British big cats are uncatchable. They are proof against lures, trigger cameras, wildlife trackers, vigilantes and military operations. The Marines spent months searching fruitlessly for the beasts of Exmoor. In fact, at this stage, there should be dozens of captured black panthers on display, alive and dead. Not to mention regular road kills. But this simply has not happened. And in addition to the bodies, there should be dozens of wildlife documentaries on ABCs. But so far, there's not even a really clear photograph of one. There are lots of bits of footage and photos which are certainly suggestive of big cats, but nothing detailed enough to establish what species they might be, if any. Here's a few which illustrate the point. He looks rather like a megalith. I thought I'd throw him in. And that's the close-up. And that's the photographer, Tim Young, who took it. And he got his friend to photograph him in the same position so he can get an idea of the scale and size of the cat, which is pretty big. I have the next one. That's the cat there. Raymond True, an RAF historian, saw this ABC in sugar beet. And the beet was nine inches high and the cat's stomach was six inches above that, he estimated. The animal moved like a cat, but it was larger and longer-bodied than a dog. And that's the fen tiger, as it became known. William Rooker took a film of this animal in Cambridgeshire in 1994. He described it as black with a flat face. I'm sorry I haven't got the film, but it moves in a very cat-like way. And as you can see, it has an incredibly long tail. In fact, its profile is very much like a cheetah. But of course, it's black, so it can't be. This is a big cat filmed last year in Burton Bradstock in Dorset. There's the close-up. Tara Lee Eggerman took this photograph. She and two colleagues were evaluating water quality at a stream and she saw this ABC. They were about 200 yards away from it and they estimated it was about three foot long, excluding its tail. Wayne Pullett took that film. There it is. Next one. That's a woman called Rachel Deathridge, and she took a video of a big cat on the Isle of Wight. She and her cousin saw that in 2002. And talking of islands, there have been four or five reliable sightings of black ABCs on the Isle of Mull over a 30-year period. This puts the final nail in the coffin of the releases and escapes theory because Mull has never had any zoos or private menageries, and it's half an hour by boat from the mainland. So you'd need to be mad to convey a leopard there. And you'd have to be even madder to do it at least twice since leopards live for only 15 years at the outside. So as you can see, photos like these almost constitute proof, but not quite. But then ABC research is the science of almost. Another puzzle with ABCs is the huge variation in their colours, sizes and shapes. They're variously described as being the size of a Labrador dog, or a German shepherd dog, or a collie, a whippet, a Great Dane, a sheep, a calf, a goat, a deer, and one police officer claimed the cat he saw was as big as a small horse. When they're not plain glossy black, ABCs colours are equally variable. They've been described as fawn, dirty grey, tawny, dark brown, beige, brindled, black-tailed, chocolate and many more. Sometimes brown animals have ringed tails or lighter patches. The commonest kind, jet black, may also have brown patches or white tips to their tails or tufted ears and so on. One such confusing animal was the ABC, a family in Galston, Ayrshire, stared at from their back door while it stared back at them. It was a sleek creature about the size of a large German shepherd dog with a long tail and tufts of fur on its ears. The fur itself was black in colour with what they described as white chaffing through the coat and above the hindquarters. It was feline, but, they said, like no cat they had ever seen before. That's a picture of the family and that's a cut out of a black panther that Mark Fraser there, who's the investigator of the case, he uses it as a way of gauging scale. So the photographer was where the family were and the cutout is where the panther was. Some of the most fascinating reports are of pure white ABCs. This is not, of course, a colour which occurs in any of the known big cats. One of the best bits of film footage is of one such animal and that's a still from the film. Frank Speake was having breakfast one morning in September 2003 when he spotted what he thought at first was a calf by a hedgerow in the adjacent field. He stood up for a better look and was taken aback to see that it was, in fact, some kind of big cat. He grabbed his camera and rushed outside, managing to capture a few seconds of film before the animal walked out of view behind the trees. He said it was easily the size of an Alsatian dog. Its tail was long, about two thirds the length of its body. Its head was carried low between its shoulders and it moved stealthily like a cat on the prowl. And they also did an investigation with that same cutout panther painted white, putting it in the same place as the original cat and thus gauging that his estimation of its size was accurate. But these are but two of the endless oddities of appearance which distinguish ABCs from known species of big cats and which are such a headache for those ABC investigators trying to pigeonhole them. The zoologist, Dr. Karl Schucher, put it succinctly. He said the British big cat would need to be nothing short of a shape shifter to account for the immense variety of felids reported. However, if these inconsistencies are annoying, there is worse to come. ABCs not only resist capture, apparently disappearing off the face of the earth, but they sometimes disappear actually in front of people's eyes. This is Jonathan McGowan and he's a naturalist. He's assistant curator at the Bournemouth Natural Sciences Society. He and a group of friends were on an island in the River Star in Dorset when they surprised a puma-like creature drinking at the river's edge. He warned them to keep back as the animal dashed for the escape route over the wooden walkway and then it disappeared before their amazed eyes. Jonathan ran forward in disbelief to find one wet paw print fading on the planks. A lorry driver near Stoke Gabriel in Devon saw an ABC no more than 30 yards away crossing into a field the other side of the lane. He said, one moment I saw it as it entered the field and the next it just seemed to disappear into the background. This picture was taken by Trevor Beer, the Devon writer and big cat investigator and he also noted the same phenomenon. He encountered panther-like animals several times on Exmoor and Dartmoor and he noticed the habit of disappearing mysteriously. Adrian Carson was fishing on this river when he came round a bend and there in front of him as plain as day was a large black panther-like cat standing there looking at him. He was rooted to the spot with fear at first but slowly started to walk backwards. He stumbled on a log and took his eyes off the animal for a split second and when he looked up it had vanished. Disappearing into thin air is only one of the habits of ABCs which differentiate them from their zoological counterparts. They also have the habit of moving with incredible speed and sometimes surreal slowness. They sometimes glance at the witness or stare at him but often they seem barely aware of their surroundings moving dreamily in a world of their own. The black ABCs may scream, the brown ones have been known to roar. They may have amber or yellow or green glowing eyes or red eyes or blue eyes. I detail many more of these weirdnesses in my book. When I set out to write my book I attempted to classify ABCs but the more research I did into them the more insistent their oddities became until I had to concede defeat. I had to face the fact that the only characteristic common to all ABCs is that they more or less resist classification. In this respect they have much in common with the hundreds of other unnerving, annoying, entrancing beings that have always populated our landscape. The black dogs of legend and folklore for instance such as Black Shark, Striker and the Bargust. Turn the Hunter, Fairies, Boggarts, Pixies, Lake Monsters, Brownies, White Ladies, Water Horses, the Lambton Worm and so on. There are hundreds of varieties. In modern times we can add space aliens, Mothmen, Owlmen, Bigfoot and so on. Like ABCs they are elusive by definition. Like them too they are shapeshifters. They appear sometimes bigger than normal and sometimes smaller. Like them they are ambiguous. The greatest authorities on these intermediate beings were the Neoplatonists who flourished from about the middle of the 3rd century AD to the middle of the 6th. They called them daemonies, daemons as we would say. Their domain was the anima mundi, the soul of the world, a middle reign in a middle region in a chain of existence between the One, the transcendent source of all things and the materiality of human life. However, this notion of intermediate beings is thoroughly unpopular nowadays. We simply can't get our heads around the idea that something may be absolutely concrete but only temporally so. Absolutely real but not in scientifically repeatable terms. We are too literal minded, preferring things to be black and white while the world of daemons is crepuscular, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, resistant to being caught and pigeonholed. Nevertheless, I would suggest that ABCs are daemons and moreover daemons uniquely tailored to our age and culture, an age and culture which does not believe in them. They have therefore had to assume a form which positively demands attention, a terrifyingly solid, glossy, black predator familiar to us from our televisions. And compared to the wary and modest daemons of earlier times, they are very insistent. They stroll around in broad daylight. They eat sheep. They chase deer. They roar. They scream. They rebound off cars. They knock down cyclists. Because the fact is that the modern ABC experience is about as vivid, concrete and un-ghost-like as it gets. People who have had such an encounter are all agreed about that and it's on such first-hand accounts that the reality of ABCs ultimately depends. So to summarise this first part of this talk, in which I've tried to give a flavour of the ABC experience and describe some of the mysteries involved with it, I'm just going to introduce you quickly to a few more of the witnesses on which the case for ABC rests. So that you can judge for yourself what pleasant, honest, sensible, solid citizens they typically are. That's Trevor Bartle. He was driving to the pub one summer night when he had to stop his car for a black cat the size of a German shepherd dog walking down the middle of the road towards him in the full beam of the headlights. When it reached him, it moved around the front of the car and looked in at Trevor through the driver's window. Next one. That's Claire Blick. She was walking down that lane by the Chivner Air Force Base and that crossed in the path in front of her and she was absolutely petrified. Being an artist, she made a very thorough description and map of the whole experience. Next one. That's Tim Madewell. He's a farmer and he farms on Borough Hill in Leicestershire. He's seen panther-like cats on three occasions. Next one. That's Don Humphries. He lives near Dis in Norfolk. He was coming back from a shopping trip with his wife on Saturday morning. He saw that cat in a field and he was a former zookeeper and terribly familiar with cats and he was very impressed by it and delighted. He didn't tell anybody for ages in case people would set out hunting it or anything. But it was lovely. That's Steve Evans. He's a shepherd in Dorset. He spotted what he at first thought were two black Labradors hunting rabbits at the bottom of a narrow steep-sided gully. He was on his quad bike there at the top of the gully looking down into it. It was too steep to descend on the vehicle. He watched them for about five minutes and then a third animal appeared about the size of an Alsatian dog and he realised he'd been looking at the cubs and this was the mother, as it were, of a family of panthers. That's Karen Rees with her dog Sunny. Every morning early, she would take Sunny for a walk in the water meadows outside Bridport in Dorset. On this one occasion, she saw something lying behind that barbed wire fence that you can see and she thought it was an animal. She thought it was her mother's black Labrador, actually. It was a very glossy black thing and she rushed forward calling the name of her mother's Labrador. And when she was a few feet from it, it sprang up and she realised it was this big cat. She estimated it was three times the size of Sunny. That's a chap called Mike, a friend of mine, and he was deerstalking with a friend in Dorset. They were returning to their car and when they were about 100 yards from it, they noticed what looked like a bag dumped on the boot of the car, as there. And when they approached, they were puzzled because they hadn't left a bag on the car but when they were about 50 yards from it, it uncurled itself and got down. Its front feet were on the ground while its back feet were still on the car, which gives an idea of the scale. Again, Mike and his friend were dumbfounded by it. So ABCs are real concrete creatures, but perhaps only temporarily so. In this, they resemble the black dogs of legend and folklore and anyone who researches the subject ends up sooner or later comparing the two, as I did. That's a representation of the black dog of Bungay in Suffolk, which terrified a church congregation in the 17th century. Black dogs traditionally patrol certain stretches of road, appearing sometimes as a harbinger of death, sometimes as a companion to a traveler, but vanishing as soon as the person attempts to pat it. They often haunt bridges, gateways, graveyards and similar liminal places and to this extent, they're closely linked with the sacred landscape. A Fortean Times writer, Steve Moore, published a thought-provoking exploration of possible links between the topographical features of his own area, Shooter's Hill in East London, and local legends and sightings of black dogs and other anomalous animals, such as the ABC known as the Shooter's Hill Cheetah. He analyzed the area in terms of the Taoist principles of yin and yang. As you know, yin, female or negative energy, is a characteristic of watery, low-lying areas, hollows, caves, tunnels, cemeteries, and other places of chthonic darkness. Yang, male or positive energy, is intensified by elevations in the land, pointed mountains or buildings and straight lines. In the Shooter's Hill area, the strongly yin quality of the marshy land surrounding it was intensified by the meandering paths of the river Quaggy and several brooks. Steve surmised that these telluric currents of energy might be concentrated at certain locations, either by the natural contours of the land or artificial constructions, in such a way that invisible energies might manifest as physical forms and effects. He suggested that because of their color, associations with death, and appearance mostly at night, black dogs are also strongly yin, and by inference might be considered visible manifestations of the powerful yin quality of the land around Shooter's Hill. This idea was neatly illustrated by the Suffolk folklorist Ivan Bunn, who plotted all the black dog legends and sightings that he knew of in East Anglia on a map of its rivers. As you can see, they follow the water courses very closely indeed. I should point out that he plotted all the sightings and legends that he knew of, not just the ones that he discovered were by streams. This tallied vision of a landscape infused with living currents which may catalyze or manifest as creatures such as black dogs led me in turn to look more closely at the landscapes in which ABCs appear, in case they could tell me more about their presence in it. There is one topographical feature that crops up time and time again in ABC reports. A quite disproportionate number of sightings are made close to and even on railway lines, used and disused. This pattern is consistent throughout the country because other long-time researchers have noticed the same thing. In Leicestershire, for instance, Nigel Spencer noted that about 70% of sightings are on or near railways, used and disused. In Lancashire, Ayrshire and Cornwall, other counties where there are long-term assiduous investigators, the proportion can be even higher. Steve Moore speculated that the reason black dogs appear in connection with rivers and watercourses might be as manifestations of those meandering lines of yin influence. But if you look at another kind of pairing, dogs can be said to be yang compared, for instance, with the indisputably feminine yin quality of cats. Might not yang black dogs manifest in opposition to or in complement to those non-straight lines of yin energy? And couldn't you say that if yang black dogs balance the meandering yin watercourses, might not yin black cats balance the straight yang railway lines? This was neat, I thought. But I soon had to concede there was much more evidence for Steve's idea than mine because once I started looking, I noticed other characteristic, unusual landscape features which crop up in ABC sightings far too often to be pure chance and they were all deeply yin. Quarries, for example. To give three out of scores of other examples, at Loudoun Hill, for instance, in Ayrshire, a black cat crossed the road into the quarry with such big strides that, the witness said, it only hit the road a couple of times. It moved in a sort of leaping movement, not like a dog in the least. John Earle saw a dark brown Alsatian-sized cat cross the road by an old quarry on White Sheet Hill in Dorset. That's that. Oh, sorry, back again. You can see the extra yin qualities there by a kind of underground tunnel. Two weeks later, he saw it, a differently coloured ABC in exactly the same spot. That's Ketton Quarry in Leicestershire and it furnishes regular sightings of ABCs. For instance, in 1999, when a party of officials checking access rights, including the chairman of the Leicester and Rutland Ramblers Association, encountered a black panther on the footpath running along the top of the quarry. It was in bright sunlight and they looked at it from 10 feet away as it strolled across their path. Needless to say, they were all converts after that one. This is a paw print, cast of a paw print also made at Ketton Quarry and it's unmistakably a big cat print and not a dog print because big cat prints have, they don't show their nails, they retract their claws when they walk and they have a kind of tri-lobed heel. That's pure panther that. But it's very unlikely to be a dog in any case because there's very high security at the quarry because of the explosives and no stray dog would be able to get into it. While numerous lanes are called after black dogs, cats commonly give their name to caves and cavities in the landscape. There's a cat hole cave in the Gower Peninsula in Wales, a cat hole on Bodmin Moor, cat hole copse in Dorset and many more. Perhaps these names preserve the memory of our native wildcat or may they commemorate past appearances of ABCs at these yin spots in the landscape. In a field near Tulsk in County Roscommon, Ireland, there's a cave, that's it. It's part constructed, part natural. It has a small insignificant opening, I mean that's about three foot I suppose, but it extends hugely underground, over 100 yards in fact underground and it has partly man-made as I say and partly natural. And more than anywhere else, it places ABCs as daemons, embodying a link between worlds. It's called in Irish, Oinagat, the cave of the cats because huge shape-shifting cats were chronicled as having emerged from it from time to time and it's also named in early Irish literature as the entrance to the other world. Quarry's caves and tunnels are obvious repositories of yin energy and I had to agree that mystery animals may be the embodiment of it. But once I was on the trail, I found more evidence too for my own idea that intensified yang energy may also precipitate a yin shadow in the form of an ABC because I found ABC sightings occurring at locations where both kinds of influence, yin and yang, seem to be activated or heightened by close proximity to each other. For instance, on the Neen Valley railway line, a driver encountered an Alsatian-sized black cat at the most yin place on it, the tunnel there. No, sorry, there. He was having lunch at the time so he threw his pie at it and it snarled before running back into the tunnel because it's also got a pit there, not to mention various yin items there. The incident was recorded by the local investigator Nigel Spencer who interestingly noted that there was a long-term local legend of a mystery black cat seen lurking near this tunnel by the A1 and which in the past had been recorded as a ghost due to its stealth and size. A Worcestershire poacher out one night in October 1995 encountered an ABC in a geometrically complex, powerfully yin landscape bisected by the mandatory yang railway line. It was beside the cavernous shape of a railway tunnel that the black creature first appeared, flying over a five-barred gate and disappearing up the steep railway embankment. He wrote, the following day, I walked along the track opposite the gateway where we'd seen the animal emerge. This track runs along fields parallel to the railway lines. About a quarter of a mile from the road, a large conduit pipe runs under the railway track and carries overflow water down into the stream that runs alongside the railway line on the field side. The height of the pipe is about four or five feet and as for the length of it, I have no idea because my dog refused to go into it. He whined and tried to pull off his lead. There was obviously something in there, whether conjured by the shapes of the landscape or not and it seemed the poacher's dog did not like it. It was events like these which suggest that apparitions could be something to do with the relationship or movement between the two aspects, the yin and yang of landscape. In Chinese geomancy, it is steep changes of direction, places of dramatic confluence or divergence of the twin flows of energy that are most significant. It's tempting to think that it's not only concentrations of one or other of these flows that might produce material manifestations such as mystery animals but also the turbulence of their meeting or parting. Some of the examples I have quoted show ABCs appearing at points where the terrain undergoes a steep change such as railway cutting, embankments, gullies, etc. It seemed to me as I read more reports that many ABCs appeared at notable interruptions or changes of direction in an otherwise consistent landscape. That's Brooklyn's, the first banked racing track. The terrain around Weybridge in Surrey, for instance, is unexceptional but it does boast one geomantically very striking feature, the old Brooklyn's car racing track. It's here that a black ABC has appeared regularly to different witnesses over the past four years at least. One of them explained, the cat sits and walks along the remaining racetrack which runs vertically around Brooklyn's. The high side of the track stands as high as a house and is almost vertical. Then it curves steeply down so that the bottom side runs along the road. Steep declivities like the Brooklyn's racetrack, caves and ravines, nowadays the habitat of ABCs have always housed anomalous beings. In former times, they were the places whence fairies traditionally emerged. For instance, Hugh Miller recorded what he, what was supposed to be the final departure of the fairies from Scotland at the Burn of Eithy. He wrote, a herd boy and his sister were lounging beside one of the cottages when just as the shadow of the garden dial had fallen on the line of noon, they saw a long cavalcade ascending out of the ravine through the wooded hollow. It wound among the knolls and bushes and turning around the northern gable of the cottage began to ascend the eminence toward the south. The circuitous route the cavalcade took from the ravine around the northern gable and up the hill to the south, its young aspect emphasized by the straight line of the gnomon on the sundial would have been recognized as a fairy path in Celtic tradition and perhaps a dragon path in Chinese. At any rate, the meandering path and its features was a natural braid of yin and yang influence and energies. It compares to the route of the ABC that Mike and Sarah Sabin saw while they were out feeding cattle in the Morvan Hills in Worcestershire. Mike said, as I approached the gate I saw this jet black cat-like animal the size of an Alsatian dog coming out of the ditch. I would describe it as stalking, walking with big tentative strides. We must have watched it for at least five minutes before it moved away down onto the Worcester to Hereford railway line and into a tunnel where we lost sight of it. Gate, ditch, railway line, tunnel. While ravines suggest movement, static anomalies in the landscape seem to brew up big cats too. One Devon witness, Shirley, was walking dogs through a field in which there was a small hollow like a bomb crater deep enough to be hidden from view until one was almost upon it. At the bottom of this the farmer had placed a cage trap for catching crows baited with a dead ewe, both items perhaps enhancing the intense yin quality of the crater. As the trap came into view, Shirley stopped in amazement as she saw a brown puma bigger than her Labrador crouched by it, snarling threateningly. As one, she and the dogs turned and fled back home as fast as they could run. Like bomb craters was also the phrase Sheila Cumber used to describe the old ironworkings in the Sussex woodland where she, along with several local people had gone to admire the bluebells. The electric blue of the flowers had contrasted dramatically with the black sky. For, she said, although it was mid-morning it had got very dark with an impending storm. Suddenly, she said, both I and the man behind me saw a black feline, long-tailed animal the size of a deer cross the path 50 yards in front. I couldn't believe it. Without looking at them, the ABC ran quickly down the steep crater's edge and disappeared into the gloom of the wood. The propensity of landscapes of this kind to generate daemons would probably not have survived Ernest Eitel, the author of the first book in English about feng shui whom I quoted a couple of slides ago. Let me quote him again. It's best to look for the most secluded retired corner for in retirement it is that dragon and tiger are most closely intertwined and there the breath is gathered most abundantly. The rule is then to look near the junction of dragon and tiger for some little hollow or little mound or in short, some sudden transition from male to female or from female to male ground. One of the most arresting illustrations of Eitel's observation was presented by Mrs. Arnold, a witness in the saga of the Surrey Puma in the 1960s. She had a close encounter with a feline animal broadly resembling a king cheetah but with tufted ears. She said, I saw it on several occasions in the distance at the dew pond and lying on the air raid shelter which used to be at Bushy Lee's farm. Consider the picture of the dew pond, a sudden declivity in a field again reminiscent of an old bomb crater and then the inversion of its shape, the domed air raid shelter crowned with a beautiful enigmatic cheetah-like animal. Whatever the ins and outs of yin and yang, it's a picture that stays in the memory. To conclude, I think you'll agree that most of the ideas I have suggested are fairly crackpot. I do actually make a much better job of explaining them in my book but it does take a whole book and I've had only 50 minutes. But the basic trouble with ABCs is that all theories about them are crackpot and none more so than those that claim not to be. And of course, this is the joy of ABCs. They're easily the most superb mystery available today, mediating in true Damon style between the worlds of reason and imagination. Our job is perhaps simply to notice them and marvel at them as many ABCs witnesses do. One thing is certain that we deny them at our peril because as Plutarch reminds us, he who denies the Demons breaks the chain that unites the world to God. Thank you.