Elaine McCallig
Dec 28, 2021
Royal Mail has outdone themselves by successfully delivering a special letter which had a vague “address” on the front of the envelope.
Cora Kelly Bell, 7, from Stirling in Scotland, gave the postman a challenge when she decided to send a “surprise letter” to her granny in Northern Ireland.
After penning her cute message, she addressed her letter simply with: “Anne, who takes photographs of Fair Head, Ballycastle, N Ireland.”
PA
Granny Anne Kelly, an amateur photographer, received her mail less than 24 hours later. Anne has developed a reputation for her stunning snaps of Fair Head, a cliff near her Ballycastle home - so when the envelope landed in the local post office, they knew just where to send it to.
Anne posts her pictures to Facebook and Twitter, and some of her snaps have even been featured on the weather bulletins on BBC and UTV.
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Anne told PA that her daughter Orla lives in Scotland with Cora and her sister Sarah. They miss each other, but regularly write letters.
Anne said: “They would quite often write wee letters to us, wee drawings that the girls have done and post it to myself and my husband Brian.
“I would then take a wee video then of Brian opening the letters and send it back to Orla to let the girls see.
“They talked about me, and the fact that I take photographs of Fair Head and that I was quite well known for that, so they thought it would make me happy if they did a letter.
“Cora wrote the message on the inside and then they talked about what they would write on the outside of the envelope. So they thought they would just put ‘Anne, who takes photos of Fair Head, Ballycastle’.”
After fixing a first-class stamp to the front of the envelope, the girls dropped it into the postbox. They didn’t think it would get to her - but within a day it arrived through Anne’s letterbox.
PA
She added: “It was a challenge to the postman to see if he could get the letter to granny. The postman passed it with flying colours.
“It was just dropped in the letterbox. I saw it and I thought it was somebody wanting to ask me something about a photograph I took.
“After I opened it I sent a message to the postman, telling him that I hoped it wasn’t too much trouble, and he said it was a collective effort in the post office to make sure it got to me.
“I suppose they just forwarded it on to Ballycastle, and decided to let the postman sort it out from there.”
The whole family is stunned that the letter arrived, with Anne joking that she’s not sure it’s the sort of thing Royal Mail would advise people to try.
It certainly gets our stamp of approval.
With reporting by PA.
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