A French message in a bottle telling of a love lost was found washed up on a Cornish beach.

The love letter was discovered with a lock of brown hair in a bottle on Praa Sands, near Falmouth.

Martin Leslie, a coastguard manager, and his family were walking along the beach and found the letter on three pages of A4 handwritten in French and dated September 28. Mr Leslie told the Falmouth Packet that he tried to translate it using the internet but could only interpret words relating to love, death and missing someone. He assumed it was a suicide note and handed it to Falmouth coastguards to pass to their counterparts in France.

But it was then realised that the message was in fact a love letter written by an unnamed French woman to her lover, who had returned to his wife. Mr Leslie said the woman said she and her lover had shared magical moments but that she understood that he had to return to his wife. She finished by saying she hoped to find another man like him with whom to live “a beautiful life.”

It said: “These magic moments are pure secret. The secret of life and pleasure without limits. In twenty years, it will still be here, the previous moments of happiness, when life will get dreary, we will be able to tap into these memories to remember what it is to live again.”