OXFORDSHIRE'S legendary wild panther has been spotted again just a week after the last sighting.

And this time, it was caught on camera.

Lorry driver Billy Williams says he had a close encounter with the beast at Oxford Services on the M40 by Wheatley – just ten miles south from the last sighting at Upper Arncott near Bicester.

Mr Williams, who lives near Gatwick airport, drives up the M40 to Birmingham on a regular basis and was making his usual journey when he pulled over for a comfort break on Friday morning about 9am.

With the lorry parking full, he drove down a quiet side road next to the service station.

He said: "I parked up and stepped out and immediately spotted it and thought – 'that's a big old cat'.

"It took me a few seconds to realise what I was actually looking at.

"It was like a cat on steroids, it was huge: it looked at me and I could see it had green eyes."

Mr Williams, 43, estimated he was no more than 50ft away from the cat and estimated it was three feet high and its tail alone a metre long.

Cautiously, he climbed back into his cab to grab his mobile phone.

When he came down the cat had walked further away, but he managed to get this picture.

He said: "I made a clicking noise and clapped and it looked back at me but it wasn't scared at all, he just carried on walking away for me – wasn't bothered.

"I didn't fancy going any closer, but I'm 100 per cent certain of what I saw: I used to be a farmer and I had horses, so I know animals.

"I have no doubt at all."

The last person to claim to have spotted a big cat strolling around Oxfordshire was mum-of-two Lisa London.

She said she was driving through Upper Arncott just south of Bicester on the morning of Tuesday, April 25, when she spotted a black cat 100 yards in front of her.

She estimated the creature was a metre tall and a metre-and-a-half long.

The two sightings are just the latest in a long line of supposed encounters dating back to the 1990s.

One of the most notorious was in 2005 when a drinker at the Masons Arms in Brize Norton near Burford managed to get several photos of the supposed animal in a field across the road, leading to the nickname 'The Beast of Burford'.

Oxford resident Steve Archibald, who runs the website bigcatsightings.com, gets three or four reports of Oxfordshire sightings each year, and says he is confident there is at least one big cat living wild in the county.