PENSIONER Gwen Wragg from Beaminster swears she was stone cold sober when she saw a black panther-like creature cavorting about her garden.

Mrs Wragg, 84, of Tunnel Road, saw the creature around lunchtime and watched it in her garden for at least five minutes.

She said: "It had to be a cat. It was a great big puma like thing.

"I was looking out of the sun lounge at the top of my garden where I have a bed of cat mint which normal cats love.

"It was slowly bobbing up and down and when it very slowly turned around I could see it had a long black bushy tail and then it turned around and jumped up out of the bed towards my herbaceous border and pounced on something."

The sighting of a big cat is the most recent of a series in west and north Dorset.

Mrs Wragg said the cat was very large and not a domestic pet. "It was very, very big and making its way down my herbaceous border and then started to scrape a swathe of earth up," she said.

"I watched it for a while and then thought: 'Enough is enough. It is going to destroy my garden'.

"I went towards the back door which is glass and continued to watch it. It was like no cat I had ever seen.

"The moment I opened the door it stopped and looked at me. It had a broad, chunky face and I would swear it had yellow eyes and very sharp, up-pointed ears.

"Then it turned into the border and jumped over the stone wall. I went to look at the swathe it had been raking up and it was four to five inches wide and no pussy could have made it. I was not frightened I was just entranced, I couldn't believe what I was looking at. I was stone cold sober I swear."