A MISCHIEVOUS woollen mill moggy who went missing for more than 24 hours had stowed away in the bodywork of a delivery van and travelled from Solva to Swansea.

Hattie, one of the two resident cats at Solva Woollen Mill, went missing last Friday night.

"We came to close up on Friday evening and she wasn't around which was a bit unusual," said owner, Solva Woollen Mill's Anna Grime.

"When we came back on Saturday morning she was still nowhere to be seen and we started to panic, we searched the area for her and knocked on our neighbours' doors with no luck."

When Anna and her husband Tom looked at their CCTV footage they could see Hattie near to the DPD van as it dropped packages off.

The couple rang their local driver, Ryan to ask if he had seen Hattie.

At 6pm Ryan rang up saying 'you are not going to believe this'. Another driver, Jamie, had been convinced that he could hear a cat crying all day but couldn't see anything in the van.

Another driver, Nathan then spotted a tuft of Hattie's tail sticking out above the inside of the back doors. The crazy cat had got into the cavity around the door frame, possibly through an air vent, and was trapped in the body work of the van.

Tom and Anna drove to the DPD depot in Swansea to find the drivers trying to tempt out Hattie with a tin of tuna but she could only get one paw and her head out. By this stage she had been stuck in the van for 28 hours.

"She was getting distressed but when she heard our voices she calmed down," said Anna.

With a 'bit of brute force and the help of a car jack' Ryan managed to make the hole bigger and Hattie was finally freed and returned to a relieved Tom and Anna.

"You couldn't have made it up," said Anna. "It's just so lucky that we made the connection [with the DPD van] otherwise we would still be looking for her and James would be driving round thinking he was going mad.

"The guys at the DPD depot were so lovely, a lot of them had stayed late and they had managed to feed her a chicken nugget."

Hattie is now safely home and keeping the other mill cat Dobbie company.

"We are so relieved to have her back," said Anna.