NURSERY teacher Ruth Marsh is still trying to come to terms with having a big, dark coloured cat loping along the side of her car.

Mrs Marsh was driving to her home at Shaw, near Lockeridge, at about 8.30pm on January 18 when the big cat appeared.

Her sighting has reawakened the debate about whether big cats in her case it would have to be a panther or a puma because of its dark colour do exist in the wild in Britain.

The British Big Cats Society, set up to monitor sightings, received more than 1,000 reports of sightings in 2002 from across Britain.

Mrs Marsh was driving home to husband Kevin and daughter Samantha, eight, down the spookily called Hangman's Hill, from East Kennett, when the big cat emerged from trees on the left hand side of the road, crossed over in front of her car and disappeared into the field in the direction of her home.

Mrs Marsh, an assistant at the Bluebell Nursery at Lockeridge, said: "The first thing that struck me was its size; it was huge, about the size of a labrador.

"It had this huge head almost the size of a football and it definitely was not a dog.

"It moved like a cat and it was not using a left foot and then a right foot but was using both front feet and both back feet together."

Mrs Marsh is convinced that what she saw was a big cat, much bigger than any domestic cat she had ever seen before.

She said: "It was the size of the head I could not get over and when I saw its eyes it was looking straight at me."

It was dark outside and the only assessment she could make of the cat's colour was that it was "very dark".

When she got to her home about a quarter of a mile from where she saw the animal she was too scared to get out of the car for several minutes in case it was still prowling.

The Gazette has reported sightings of black big cats as far apart as Calne, Great Bedwyn and Malmesbury.

Last year there was a reported sighting of a big cat, a black one, at Compton Bassett, which is only a few miles cross country from where Mrs Marsh made her sighting.

Experts say that if there are big cats on the loose in Britain they could have territories covering many miles.