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A man claims he saw something unusual on his train journey through Somerset - Bigfoot.

The witness said he was on a train to Bristol Temple Meads, which was approaching the city on a Friday morning in November last year, when he saw a massive creature taking huge strides along a hedgerow.

Devon Live reported the sighting was made to the British Bigfoot Sightings group – a team of researchers who collect and investigate sightings of upright hairy ape-like creatures in Britain.

The man claimed he left Exeter late in the morning, and there were few people on the train as it approached Bristol.

“In my carriage was probably ten to 12 people - most of them with their head in either mobile phones or morning newspapers,” he told researchers.

“I haven’t been on a train for years so I was keen to take in the scenery.

“About ten miles from Bristol we were travelling through an area and in the fields to my right I saw something large in the middle of the field walking, it was walking kind of hunched over, and all I could tell you was it was a black figure.

“At a guess I would’ve said it was 70 to 100 metres away from the train. My eyes were glued on it at this point.

“I was watching the way the ‘thing’ was walking, almost towards the side of the field, it was edged right up to the hedgerow as if to walk alongside the hedge itself, almost like it was using the hedge for cover?

“To my eye whatever it was seemed to take massive strides, and ‘it’ was covering the ground very quickly.

“As I spun my head to the left to see if anybody else on the train had seen what I was looking at, I was surprised to see that nobody was really looking out from the seats in my direction, or any direction other than down to be fair,” he added.

The witness's judgement suggests he saw 'Bigfoot' between Nailsea and Yatton train stations - around ten miles before the train arrived at Temple Meads.

The countryside in this point is low-lying wetland, between the M5 and the wooded hillside escarpment that runs up to Bristol Airport.

“I would imagine five to ten seconds was all I saw it for,” he added.

“But it stood out to me as strange. To start off with, I didn’t think it was a Bigfoot or anything like that, until I watched how it walked and the way it hugged the hedgerow.

“I thought it was just somebody walking through a field, and if they were not acting in such a strange manner, with a strange gait, and hugging the bushes to stay hidden, surely a person wouldn’t do that? Or would look like that?

“Then, about two minutes later, after viewing this figure I saw a couple walking a collie dog in a field, roughly the same distance that I’d seen the black figure.

“They were to the side of the hedge line. I was gobsmacked to see that I could hardly make them out, I mean, I knew they were humans walking with the dog but I couldn’t really see what they were wearing apart from the brightly coloured coats.

“And it dawned on me that they were probably of average size male and female, although what I had seen five minutes earlier was clearly not. It was an all-black figure in a field, ‘it’ was huge.

“I could see the black figured arms and legs and chest, compared to the two humans I had just seen walking the dog.

“At the point of seeing the black figure I realise the tree line behind it was probably around 200 m away and had a thick dense forest behind it. I have no proof whatsoever to show you, only my word.

“I’m 100 per cent sure what I saw was the English Bigfoot - and what makes me so confident is the way it walked, with slightly bent legs, long strides but a graceful fluid walking motion,” he added.

While sightings of a hairy creature which walks on two legs are an almost daily occurrence somewhere in North America – and the subject of TV series, books and films – even seasoned Bigfoot experts have questioned whether the animal could exist in the British Isles.

But sightings continue to be reported to British Bigfoot researchers, from the dense woods of Suffolk to the remote mountains of Scotland.

There have always been folklore tales of a hairy man-like creature living in forests of England - back in the Middle Ages they were known as 'woodwose'.

One leading British Bigfoot researcher Deborah Hatswell said it was possible a Bigfoot-like creature could still exist in Britain.

“In 2012, the Government produced the National Eco-System Assessment, and it showed that only between six and eight per cent of the land in Britain is actually built on – the rest is either forest, farmland or wild mountains or downs,” she said.

“People who are open-minded about whether such a creature could exist in the vast forests of North America, might think Britain is too built-up, but it’s actually not. When you look at the reports of sightings in this country, they tend to follow rivers and forests,” she added.

“There have always been folklore stories about wildmen living in the woods in this country – they date back centuries and have those stories have continued.

“People are still reporting seeing these creatures that look like monkeys in the woods, running across the road at night, and in this case, walking along a hedgerow in a rural area near Bristol.

“The thing that makes this witness so sure is that he was able to compare the size of the thing he saw with two people he saw a couple of fields away.

“The first thought is always ‘is this a man in a hunter’s ghillie suit?’, but the way it walked and its sheer size makes him 100 per cent certain,” she added.

“He wasn’t someone with an active interest in Bigfoot before this incident, but it has changed his life. He found our research group online, and found somewhere to report what he saw. Now he’s going out doing his own research, looking for signs in the woods near his home,” she said.

Have you seen Bigfoot? Do you have a North Somerset story? Email me at Michael.taylor@trinitymirror.com.

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