I also saw what I thought was a wild-cat only a few feet away from where I happened to have been pretty much hidden behind some gorse when I lived in Scotland, in a very out-of-the-way-place near the small village of Alyth. The reason I had climbed up the hill in the first place was that I wanted to find and check-out a single large stone-age stone at the time.
Upon my returning home, I paid a visit to the local library to check it out properly. I found out to my amazement that it wasn't a wild-cat at all! It was in fact a very growly Lynx, and a pretty big one at that, full of muscle walking back up a drystone hill burn gulley. And that certainly made the hair on the back of my neck stand up!