- An 83-year-old woman in
Cornwall went missing on Saturday after falling 70 feet down a ravine. - Search parties were pointed in the right direction by the meows of the woman's cat, Piran.
- A neighbor of the woman, who is in a stable condition, says Piran is "very attached" to his owner.
A black cat has been praised by police in Bodmin, Cornwall, after its meowing alerted a
Speaking to Sky News, Tamar Longmuir, the neighbor who first discovered the missing woman on Saturday, said without the cat's meows, her search party wouldn't have been able to find the elderly owner so quickly.
"Without the cat waiting at the gate to that field, it could have been hours later that I or anyone else would have checked in there," she told the publication.
Longmuir, 38, told Sky News a friend of the woman first informed her she was missing on Saturday afternoon, and a rescue party among those living nearby was quickly formed to search the farmland where they all live.
During the search, Longmuir also said she and her family came across the woman's black cat, Piran, sitting atop a gate by a maize field, meowing at them non-stop.
"The cat is very attached to her, and he was going back and forth in the gateway and meowing, so I decided to go and search the maize field," Longmuir told the publication.
"I walked right around to the bottom of the field, calling the lady's name," she added. "Just as I was going to go off the path and start going through the crop, I heard a very faint response to my calling... I then quickly realized my neighbor was down the 70-foot ravine."
"She had gone through the barbed wire and was laying in the stream - we think she had been in there for hours," Longmuir said.
Bodmin Police officers, who responded to the scene after receiving an emergency rescue call, managed to bring the woman to safety in two hours, Longmuir told Sky News.
They were assisted by Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service, a specialist water rescue team, South Western Ambulance service, and Cornwall Air Ambulance, who transported the woman to hospital after she was retrieved from the bottom of the ravine, according to a post on the Bodmin Police Facebook page.
Updating their Facebook followers on Saturday, local police had nothing but praise for the hero of this story, Piran the cat, writing: "Piran the cat saved the day!"
They also managed to provide an update on the owner, sharing that she was in "good spirits" and receiving care after she was airlifted to the hospital from the field.
Bodmin Police did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.