Lego dragons, cocaine and £12,000 BMW bikes: Britain’s best beachcombing finds

This weekend, hundreds of pink plastic bottles landed on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall. What else has made the south-west the undisputed capital of washed-up treasures?

We've seen Blackpool swamped with chocolate biscuits and Worthing almost buried under mounds of wood, but the the undisputed capital of British beachcombing is the south-west. The Channel is one of the world's busiest shipping lanes, the weather down there can get extremely wild and, of course, this is often the first bit of Britain to be reached by the Atlantic current, which then drops much of what it is carrying on the Isles of Scilly, Devon and Cornwall - where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pink plastic bottles washed up at the weekend.

Sadly, and contrary to popular belief, there is no loophole that makes you the legal owner of anything you find washed up on a beach. You may get a reward if you correctly report your finding to Alison Kentuck, the receiver of wreck. If the owner does not claim it within 12 months, you may even get to keep it. Otherwise, in the eyes of the law, taking wreckage is simply stealing. Even so, the thrill of finding some things should be enough to encourage a lot more walks by the seaside.