Lundy Letterboxes

Pete has already mentioned that one day of our Lundy rock climbing adventure was washed out. Not bad really for British summer weather, just one day in eight being wet. That day, whilst in the shop buying supplies for our evening meal, Pete spotted a Lundy Letterboxing clue pack. It was just £4.99. A bargain way to turn a wet day getting bored and festering in the hut into an outdoor, all-weather, adventure…

There are 27 clues/letterboxes hidden on the island, plus a roving Lundy Bunny, a clue on the MS Oldenburg, and a bonus clue whose description is hidden with one of the other regular letterboxes. Each letterbox contains a log book to record your visit in, and a unique rubber stamp to collect an impression of.

The hardest of the letterboxes was probably the one hidden on top of Rat Island. This was because it is only accessible at low water and required some exciting scrambling up slippy rain soaked rock – not for kids in the wether we had! The trickiest to find was at the Earthquake. This was because it was so well hidden, not having any tell tale erosion on the path leading the letterbox hunter directly to it, or being given away by being buried under an almost cairn like pile of stones that are supposed to be hiding it.

Wet weather equals Lundy letterbox hunting...
Wet weather equals Lundy letterbox hunting...

We found 20 of the letterboxes on our wet day. That was enough to put the finish line within sight, and so the remaining ones were ticked off between rock climbs over the next two days to make a clean sweep. It did, very slightly, dictate where we climbed on those two days to enable both activities on the same day, but what an ace adventure! We certainly got to see far more (all) of the island than just climbing would have allowed. 😀

We were only the 11th team this year to find all the letterboxes. 😛 When I collected our completion certificate we were told we’d be listed in the next book recording the history of Lundy letterboxing. Especially because we found two Lundy Bunnies. Last year a completing team reported that they’d failed to find the bunny (despite two circuits of the clues!), so a new bunny stamp was put out in the wild. It looks like that was an error and the first bunny was just hiding too well. 😉

Finishing off the last few letterboxes in between climbs!
Finishing off the last few letterboxes in between climbs!

Here are all of the Lundy stamps. It doesn’t give anything away to the prospective hunter as at the end-of-the-day knowing what a stamp looks like doesn’t help finding the location of each one and getting it’s impression any easier! 😉

18 thoughts on “Lundy Letterboxes”

  1. Being a climber/(semi)caver kind of girl,I was looking for letter boxes in the most tricky of places, until I remembered that it’s all probably aimed at children and families and I really don’t need to dive in to the smallest of squeezes or climb up loose vegetated unstable rock faces. 😯

  2. There is a roving Lundy Bunny (well, two Roving Lundy Bunnies). The Bunnie stamp gets moved about from one letterbox to another… I don’t know who moves it (them). It would be annoying if it was in a box you hadn’t yet found, and then someone moves it to a box you have already visited. Then you would never see it!!!

  3. I got back from 3 days in Lundy yesterday and we too did the letterbox hunt on the wet day! We got all the stamps (inc 2 bunnies). I think the Windy Windmill was the hardest to find, that clue was quite obscure!

    1. Cool, did you get a certificate? Maybe you saw our smiley faces in the log books? What was your entry? Perhaps we crossed paths?
      Windy Windmill – is that the bonus Pilot’s Quay?

      1. Didn’t get a certificate, didn’t know such a thing existed! Where did you collect that from? I’ve got all my stamps in the inside cover of my guide book so when I’m next back I can claim my prize…
        Yeah, the Pilot’s Quay is the Windy Windmill

        1. The certificate is available from the island shop – they check your stamps carefully and you even need the MS Oldenburg one, so get that from the boat first.
          Wow – the inside of your guidebook cover must be packed – amazed you had space! A cool place for the memento though! 🙂 Where did you get the clues from?

          1. Ah, We didn’t get the Oldenburg until the return journey so the certificate will have to wait until next time.
            We bought the clue pack from the shop, but thought it’d be fun to have the stamps in our guides.

  4. The story of the two bunnies is that someone put the bunny in the postbox on the MS Oldenburg on the last sailing of the year, so that all the people using the helicopter over the winter could not find the bunny and it did not turn up again until the first sailing of the next year. As a result of complaints they put out a new bunny and then there was two. We have just done them but for rat island which can only be done on a tide below 1.8 metres ( it was 2.4 when we tried so the access was submerged)and to think we got up at five in the morning to try!!!!!.

  5. Latest news from the island is that a new different bunny hopped onto the island in March 2016 and has been seen in the church and also it hopped up the island and was seen at the Old Light, Benjamins Chair handstamp has also been updated and the one on the island in 2015 was different to the one in the reference book, that 2015 version was replaced in March 2016 and Benjamin is now a frog sitting by a pond under an umbrella. A letterbox at the Duck Pond was seen in Jan 2016. This one is not logged and is quite scarce….

  6. The illustrated list shown on this page is NOT complete, so everyone back to Lundy and look for the additional three that I know are on the island.

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