The Blue Ground Beetle Carabus intricatus is the largest British ground beetle. It has always been a rare and elusive insect, confined to a handful of ancient pasture woodlands in Devon and Cornwall. The map of its British Distribution (Luff 1998) provides a graphic demonstration of its extreme rarity. By the mid-1970s, recent records were so few that Lindroth (1974) considered the species to be 'very rare, perhaps extinct'.