Three years for The Cat to allow human touch seems a long time, yet there were some cats who remained completely feral.

Over time, even the most hardened feral cat would usually become accustomed to having the humans around, so long as we respected their space, kept our distance, and did not try to approach them.

And then there was Mystery. We assumed Mystery was female, but who knows – we were never going to get close enough to find out.

She appeared in the fields one winter; we had a brief glimpse, long enough to take a photo, and then she was gone.

She most likely came to eat under cover of darkness – she didn’t appear to be particularly thin, so she had to be eating somewhere.

The following spring we had two more glimpses of her in the fields, one in the long grass and then again on the roof of a farmer’s hut.

One evening I observed her in the late afternoon, coming to eat in the path. She was wary of everything, and to say she approached at snail’s pace would probably have made it seem faster than it was. She eventually made it to the food bowls, but by now it was well after dark as it had taken her so long to make the two minute walk from the fields.

Then she started to spend time sitting on the farmer’s roof in the sun; she seemed relaxed there, and, so long as we were quiet and she didn’t notice us, we could take photos from a distance.

But if she spotted us, she would instantly disappear. She looked like a lovely cat, not so old, with beautiful grey, tawny and white markings.

And one day, as we wondered whether we would ever get a good look at her, she turned round and looked directly at us – a look of shock and horror on her part – and we managed to get two clear photos of her face before she headed off into the fields.

Mystery was no longer a mystery.