It was very late, nearly eleven at night, and very dark but a large mammal was moving off the badly lit road ahead of me to my right and off into the fields. I was two or three miles outside Whitchurch in Shropshire, heading back to the Welsh Hovel and I swear that the animal was bouncing along like a Kangaroo or Wallaby. I am convinced that it was the latter.
There are about 100 such creatures meant to be resident in the United Kingdom. The largest colony established after a zoo break peaked at 60 creatures in the late 1970s, was about 35 miles from Whitchurch at Leek in Staffs. But that colony was meant to have died out by the early 2000s although there were newspaper reports of a sighting in 2009.
The main colonies left are in Sussex and Norfolk but there have been rogue sightings in Northants and London in recent years. Maybe I am mistaken but I am sure that what I saw was a Wallaby.