A Romford man said he was “a million per cent” sure that the creature he saw near a caravan site was the ‘Essex lion’ – reportedly on the loose at the weekend.

Rich Baker, 39, who was holidaying with his family in St Osyth, said: “A man started running towards us yelling ‘It’s a f****** lion!’. He looked so panicked you knew it was not a joke. You could see the lion from the side.

“It was one million per cent a lion. It was a tan colour with a big mane, it was fully grown, it was definitely a lion. It was just standing there; it seemed to be enjoying itself.”

Mr Baker, who was out with his two sons, aged nine and 11, said they had made a dash to the safety of their caravan on the site at Earls Hall Farm.

He said: “I grabbed my children’s hands and we ran towards our caravan. My children started to scream, “Daddy, is the lion going to get us?”

Essex police have now called off its widespread search for the lion and suggested the animal was more likely a large domestic cat or wildcat.

Officers spent almost 24 hours combing the countryside around Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, after residents and holidaymakers claimed on Sunday to have seen the big cat near Earls Hall Drive, in St Osyth.

But search teams, including helicopters with heat-seeking equipment and experts from Colchester Zoo, found nothing

The culprit, according to the Daily Mirror, could have been Tom, a 12-year-old ginger tomcat that lives at an old people’s home nearby and likes to prowl the fields.

Police were shown images of the animal captured by a local and could not rule out that it was a lion.

Denise Martin, a warehouse operative from Canvey Island, was the first to spot the beast.

She said: “We had a look and it looked like a lion,” she said. “I said to my husband ‘What do you make of that?’ He said: ‘That’s a lion.’ We walked out of the caravan nearer to the field to get a better look.”

She said the lion was tan coloured with a white chest.

Police said they had to take the reports seriously because of their duty to protect public safety.