In an age of emails, Twitter and Facebook, the traditional letter writing continues, but a letter that arrived in Kildorrery didn't come by conventional post and instead found its way to a mysterious destination in a balloon.

A little 11-year-old girl, Bethany Louise Deary, from Ingram Road Primary School in Leeds was among a class who were given assignments to write letters and send them off in balloons and whoever got a reply from the furthest location would win a prize.

Bethany's letter was discovered two days after it left Leeds in a balloon caught on a wire on the O'Flynn farm in Gurrane, Kildorrery. 8-year-old Fiona O'Flynn first thought that it was rubbish and almost discarded it, before she spotted the letter in the balloon and excitement bubbled inside her. 

Bethany's letter was full of plea's about writing back and giving her some information about her mysterious pen pal.

Fiona wrote back by email and said: "My name is Fiona O'Flynn and I found your balloon on my parents' farm on the 29th of March, 2013. It was caught in a wire. My parents' farm is in Kildorrery, Co Cork, in the south of Ireland.
 
"I am eight years old and in second class. I like horses and puppies. On my farm we have three horses. There are 18 children in my class - 10 boys and 8 girls. There are 139 children in my school and we have seven teachers.
 
Yours sincerely,
Fiona O'Flynn."

In another bizarre twist to the tale, the teacher who orchestrated the project in Leeds, Mark Corkery has roots in Cork, as this is where his own father was from and he said that most of the balloons only went less than 100 miles away within England, so Bethany's was the only one to get into another country.

Mark added that it was quite astonishing that out of the 200 balloons that were released by all of the students, one would find its way to a farm in Cork.

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