Kevin Keegan ice-lolly stick washes up on Cornwall beach 40 years on

Beach cleaner Andrew Frost found the Kevin Keegan lollipop stick in Cornwall

A plastic lollipop stick modelled to look like football player Kevin Keegan has washed up on a Cornish beach 40 years after it was made.

Andrew Frost, from Turn the Tide Cornwall, found the plastic stick while doing a beach clean on Daymer Bay.

The ice lollies were part of a 1970s campaign where children could paint the sticks and make a football team.

Mr Frost said single-use plastics washing up, like the ice-lolly stick, were a "problem".

The Kevin Keegan ice-lollies were part of a 1970s campaign

"It's harming our wildlife" and "doing serious danger to the environment", said the Cornish beach cleaner.

"We see them on our coastline washing up on a daily basis and it's things like that we need to change."

Mr Keegan was a popular celebrity in the 1970s, and was "never off the television screen" in both football and advertising, BBC Archive said.

The ex-England striker played for several clubs, including Newcastle United, Southampton, Liverpool and Hamburger SV, before becoming a manager.

The lollipops made in the 1970s were modelled on Kevin Keegan

"The age of this one piece of litter shows how the consequences of individual, seemingly small, acts of environmental vandalism are still with us decades later," said Allison Ogden-Newton, CEO of Keep Britain Tidy.

She said every piece of litter is a "direct threat' to the environment "because wherever its journey ends, it could stay there for hundreds of years".

It is not the first time one of these figurines has washed up on an English beach, one also washed up in Bournemouth in 2016.