Report via Chris Smith

Beast of West Lothian Seen Again

From an e.mail, 10 th January 2001

Sighting from November 1999.

I was reading your wesite recently and thought you might find this little anecdote interesting for your files. Its not particularly long, or particularly shocking, but it might be worth a couple of minutes reading.

I live in Livingston, my parents live in Linlithgow and have since I was a child, I have a number of friends in still Linlithgow and keep in touch with a number of people I grew up with in the 70s and 80s. One of my friends who lives now in Ratho, is a keen field sportsman and he and I regularly coarse shoot on farmland in the hills between Linlithgow and Livingston (his parents used to live on a hill overlooking Broxburn / Livingston area for a number of years and consequently he knows a number of the farmers in the area - who give him permission to shoot on this land - incidentally he is also an ex-gamekeeper and has worked on Estates in the Borders and Hopetoun estate).

One night, in November 1999, we were shooting on farmland beside the main road between Kingscavil and Dechmont, beside the small Lochan at the bottom of the hill, along the crest of which runs the road between the Linlithgow / Dechmont road and the North Mains road. At the time, roughly 11:30pm on a very clear, frosty pitch black night, we had been 'Lamping' for foxes, using a high powered lamp plugged into the cigarette plug of a Subaru Legacy 4WD estate. Given the time, we were wrapping up for the night after about four hours shooting in various locations, we had the Rifle broken down and put away in its case, but still had the Lamp out.

We were driving up the hill toward Dechmont with my friend driving and me in the passenger seat with the Lamp. I had the window of the car down and was pointing the beam out toward a small wood to the right of the car.

There were a number of 'contacts' where the light shines off eyes of livestcok and other reflective surfaces, however, at one point the reflection of a pair of eyes showed green. This is the signature of a cat. (dogs and foxes are blue, sheep orange, rabbits red, horses white etc).

Not being suspicious we just sat in the car after parking up and looked at the cats eyes for a time. The eyes didn't move much, indicating the amimal was stationary.

When the animal started to move, we realised that it was very close to the car, and the side of the field - we initally thought that it was much further away, but as it moved we could see that it was actually coming slowly toward us, but veering away up a ridge to the front of the car. We were still on the road and parked on the verge of the field.

We thought that the behaviour of the animal was a bit strange, as cats generally don't really pay much attention if you do see them out and about, but this one was definately interested. We also though that the size of the reflected eyes were a bit big from the distance we were looking at it from, (about 50 metres).

My friend got the rifle out of its case to use the telescopic sight (the weapon was not loaded and the bolt was removed), when we looked at the animal we could see it was a cat, and it appeared to be a pretty big one. At this point the animal was still not really clearly visible, as it was still in among the rubble in the field which obscured our view of it.

I kept the lamp on it for a good ten minutes, while it slowly moved up the ridge, until it got to a position where it was visible in profile. Although we couldn't see the thing that well, at this point the animal was visibly cat like in appearance against the background, we could only really see the head, which was feline, but very powerful. My friend owns a Rottweiler, which often goes out with him on these events (not tonight though) and he estimated that at that range, the head was of a comparable size to the dog's with a similar shoulder build, when viewed through the scope.

This stand off lasted for about twenty minutes until the animal was about thirty metres away and off to our right on high ground, we were both cold and ever so slightly unsettled by the event and decided to move off. Even when the car started, we could see the animal, by way of its eyes, didn't move and kept staring.

As we drove off toward Dechmont, the eyes disappeared and after a few sweeps of the lamp, the animal had disappeared.

I don't know exactly what it was we saw that night, but it was definately a cat (proved by the colour of the eyes) and in our educated opinion through years of hunting and gamekeeping was a fairly sizeable and powerfully built, dark coloured one. Maybe we saw a puma, who knows? All I know was that it was pretty eerie and we returned home spooked by the incident.

Hope this is of interest.

November 1999

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