A POPULAR village postie has been hanging up his mail bag for the last time after more than 24 years service.

Dobbin Parton, aged 65, is a familiar face around Kempsey in his Royal Mail van and has many tales from his years posting letters and parcels.

The loyal postman, once asked to deliver a live sheep, was also gardener, odd-job man and chauffeur for a former owner of historic village home The Nash.

Mr Parton, of Napleton Lane, said: “It’s been a brilliant job.”

Mr Parton has been training his replacement in the past few months before delivering his last letter in September.

Over the years he has been greeted at the door by a female householder wearing nothing but her smile and had to rush to a villager knocked out in a house fall, by scaling a ladder and using an upstairs window.

Life has been anything but ordinary for Mr Parton who only met his long lost sister – adopted at birth and now living in Corfu – last year.

The postman started off on a bicycle in 1983 cycling miles covering postal rounds in and around Kempsey.

Mr Parton said: “Because it’s a rural area you’re the only person some of the elderly see for days. I’ve lost an awful lot of them recently – you deliver the Queen’s telegram on their 100th birthday. Then they’ve gone.”

For many years, he worked at the village’s Elizabethan manor house The Nash for then owner Constance Dunn. He even spent 18 months on the dole caring for his former boss at his home after a fruitless search for a nursing home. Mrs Dunn died in 1982.

The following year he replaced the retiring postman on a relief round delivering to 200 doors each day and became full time in the 1990s.

Happily married to wife Marilyn for 41 years, he is working as a gardener and handyman.

David Harrison, Kempsey parish council chairman, said: “As a postman he will be sadly missed.”