Liz has been tracking a ‘mother and cub’ around her home for several years and has shared her latest experiences on the Big Cat Conversations podcast.
One encounter came last August, when she turned round at her kitchen sink to see a “big black cat” through her open doorway, standing just feet away.
“I just turned to my right and looked and there was just a cat. A big black cat, stood just looking at me,” she said. “She was just stood looking at me, not aggressive, just looking as if to say: what are you doing? She turned around very slowly and then just walked away.
“She was beautiful. She was perfect. She had silky, silky fur. She was gleaming in the sunlight.”
Liz estimates the ‘mother’ is around eight years old, “just at the peak of life.” But it is the youngster, believed to be pushing two years old, that has begun to alarm her.
She says that in January, when heading out before dawn to fill bird feeders, she turned a corner and found a cat standing in the beam of her head torch.
“I thought, you don’t look quite the same. I don’t think you’re the same cat,” she said. “It looked at me as if to say: I’m not moving.
“The whole vibe of the cat was different.”
A few days later, taking rubbish out at 8pm, she found the same animal scratching through her compost heap.
“I walked in backwards,” she said. “I didn’t dare turn my back.”
She now believes this is the grown ‘cub,’ a young male with a thicker head shape than the mother, and far less predictable behaviour.
“I just don’t know what its behaviour is going to be,” she said.
On another early January morning, whilst being fed, one of her barn cats suddenly sat up and stretched its neck up just moments before Liz heard what she described as a “roar which turned into a growl.”
The final event came the next day when, looking out of her bedroom window, she watched a group of six sheep bolt across a field, pursued by a ‘black cat.’
“He wasn’t running flat out to catch them,” she said. “It was some kind of game. Then he just broke away and ran off up the field and disappeared.”
Liz, who has previously faced ridicule online for speaking publicly about the large cats, said: “If you don’t believe that big cats are roaming the British countryside, that’s fair enough. But don’t call people who’ve seen them liars.”
The existence of big cats in Cumbria is hotly debated, with a number of sightings reported over the years.