A MISSING cat last seen by its Herefordshire family two-and-a-half years ago has turned up safe and well.

Seven-year-old Ollie went missing from Helen and Phil Rees’ Belmont home in Hereford in July 2013.

At the time, the couple’s worried children, Jamie and Ellie, now 13 and 11, scoured the streets looking for the black-and-white moggy, even putting up posters appealing for help to find him.

But the trail went cold until last week when Mrs Rees received a call saying Ollie had been taken to a boarding house in Kingsland, near Leominster.

He has since been reunited with his family, who now live in Lugwardine, just outside Hereford.

“It was a very traumatic time for us,” said Mrs Rees.

“I had reported him missing and he was chipped.”

The reunion came about following a message left on Mrs Rees’ phone from a veterinary surgery which had scanned Ollie’s microchip.

“I wasn’t sure at that point whether he was alive,” she said.

“It turns out he had got to Redhill where a woman had been feeding him. But some of her neighbours were complaining so she took him to the boarding house.”

She says Ollie had no fleas on him and looked healthy when they collected him.

“The children were very excited,”

she said. “He wasn’t wary of us at all. When we went to pick him up we could hear him purring.”

Ollie had only been living with the family for 10 days when he went missing having moved with his owner, Mrs Rees’ mother-in-law, who moved from Whitecross to the family home in Belmont after undergoing chemotherapy.

She has since sadly died.

Mrs Rees said they initially thought Ollie may have returned to the Whitecross house.

“I don’t think Ollie understood what was happening,”

said Mrs Rees.

“When he went missing he was wearing a burgundy harness.

We don’t know what happened to that though.

“We’re just glad he’s back.”