If you pay your postal workers well enough that they care about their job, you don't need any formal addressing beyond getting the letter to the right person. A postal code can be enough in some cases!

Back in the day, the mailman knew how to find every house in his area. With larger cities you'll probably need more mailpeople, but there's no reason why it this system can't work today. It is working in Costa Rica, at least.

Automated systems and digital catalogues are expensive to set up and a pain to maintain. If you live in a remote village of 1000 people, a place name and a last name are often all you need to get your mail delivered. In your example, a Stirling is a town of 38k people. Names may not be enough for everyone, but house names and descriptions will certainly do the job. All the sorting facility needs to do is make sure the mail ends up in Stirling and let the mail handle itself from there!

I met Cleto Pavanetto, who was the head of the Vatican's Latinitas Foundation, around 2008. (Our only common language was Latin!)

https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleto_Pavanetto He told me that he could receive mail addressed only to

  Cletus
  Vatican

That's the shortest address (?) Of anyone I've met, I think!

Long ago, I lived in Alamogordo, NM. My wife and I got a Christmas card from my mother, never one for details, addressed simply to "my last name, Alamo, Mexico" - no zip, nothing. Somehow, it got to us. I always guessed it was a small enough place at the time that the newest person with that last name was known to the postal employees.