An adventurous Eden kitten hitched a lift under the bonnet of a car and ended up 25 miles away in Carlisle.
Honey, a 12-week-old ginger and white cat, clambered into the engine compartment of an electric Kia belonging to a couple who had visited her owner, Ann Hope, of Clifton, yesterday.
A distressed Mrs Hope contacted her friends later on that evening when she realised that Honey, along with her sister, Rascal, a tortoiseshell kitten, had both gone missing.
Both are in the habit of clambering into the engine compartments of cars.
“I called them and my friend went out and opened his bonnet and there was a set of eyes looking back at him,” said Mrs Hope, who was then concerned for the welfare of Rascal.
She searched high and low for Rascal and paid a visit to Sainsbury’s in Penrith after the couple told her that they had called in to do some shopping and parked in the disabled bay on the way home.
A couple of customers confirmed that they had seen a kitten in the car park but Mrs Hope’s frantic efforts to locate the feline failed and she feared the worst.
But this afternoon a neighbour living half a mile away at Clifton Dykes called at her home with Rascal after seeing social media reports about the missing kitten.
The neighbour had found the cat at 3am.
“She’s home. I’m just so glad she’s home. I feel brilliant,” said Mrs Hope, who used to work at Lloyd’s bank in Penrith.
“She is going to be a cat with nine lives. That is two she has used up, she got nipped under a door last week and was in a bad way for a bit but she is better now.”
