A Falmouth business owner tracked down three people who smashed the windows of her cafe and convinced them to pay up for the damage.

Nicola Willis, who owns Pea Souk on Well Lane, arrived at the vegetarian cafe on Friday morning to find that her front windows and their listed wooden frames had been smashed after a scuffle in the early hours.

She told the Packet: "I have been round to see them at their houses and gave them a bit of a shock, especially because their parents were there.

"None of them have denied it, they have all said 'it was me and I'm really sorry,' which is great.

"I will probably report it to the police as well, but if they're going to reimburse me I don't see the need to prosecute them.

"I don't want to ruin their college career."

She added: "I said to one of them 'let this be a lesson, let this be a deterrent because it's not hard to find out who you are.'"

Nicola said that bouncers from the nearby Club International witnessed a young woman having an argument with a man before another man came over and pushed the first through the window.

Luckily the security guards took down the names and phone numbers of the three involved and passed them on to Nicola, who undertook some social media sleuthing work of her own and managed to track them down.

She told the Packet that the broken windows would cost more than £500 to replace, and that the cafe lost four days of trade because of the safety issues involved.

Pea Souk was not the only business that has had to deal with smashed windows in recent weeks, with Falmouth Bookseller, Ciuri Ciuri and the Card Factory all suffering from similar incidents.

The Card Factory in Falmouth had two windows broken in the last two weeks, and Falmouth Bookseller had one broken six weeks ago when someone was jumping up and down on a pile of rubbish outside the shop and fell through the glass.

Ron Johns, who owns Falmouth Bookseller on Church Street, said: "I absolutely adore Falmouth, but in the evening it's a bit of a wild west town.

"We regularly get windows broken, once every 18 months. It's pretty miserable when it happens to us really."

Ron also pointed out that Falmouth was not the only town affected, and that his shops in Plymouth, St Ives and Dartmouth all regularly had their windows smashed; usually, he says, by accident.

Mariangela Aiuto, who owns Ciuri Ciuri on Church Street, spoke to the Packet about how she had been affected by a huge bill after their shop window was smashed one night during Falmouth Week.

She said: "When we see that in a second we have to spend £1,000, it's not nice. I feel anxious constantly because we can't be sure that this won't happen again. We feel that we are not protected."