FT252


Thus wrote the 16th-century histor­ian, Raphael Holinshed in his Description of England: “Lions we have had very many in the north parts of Scotland, and those with manes of no less force than those of Mauretania; but how and when they were destroyed as yet I do not read”.


Destroyed, eh? Holinshed might have been interested to find that lions still crop up in modern Britain.


Early on the morning of 29 July 1976, two milkmen saw what they insisted was a lion with a bushy-tipped tail in a field at Toller­ton near Nottingham airport, prompting a fruitless big game hunt by the police.