Karl Bushby steps onto Shakespeare Beach after a 20-hour Channel swim and 28 years of walking

Karl Bushby put his feet on Shakespeare Beach, just south of Dover, at 15:30 BST on Monday. The former paratrooper, now 57, had been in the water for about 20 hours across three days. The landing is the last sea crossing on a walk that began in Chile on 1 November 1998.

He set himself two rules at the start. He would not use transport to advance. He would not go home to Hull until the journey was finished. On those terms the English Channel was not a stunt added at the end. It was the only legal way left across the water. Channel Tunnel managers had refused him access to a service tunnel. HM Coastguard said it liaised with French authorities and maritime partners so that safety protocols were met.

What 28 years actually covered

Bushby's team says he has walked more than 30,000 miles, about 48,000 kilometres, through 29 countries. The route ran the length of South America, through the Darién Gap into Colombia, north to Alaska, and across the Bering Strait in 2006, on foot where the ice held and swimming where it did not. He then crossed Siberia and the rest of Asia. The Caspian Sea took 31 days of swimming. He entered Europe last year and reached the Channel last month.

The expedition's working name is the Goliath walk, billed by Bushby as an attempt at the longest unbroken path a person has made. The unbroken part is the point of the rules. A flight, a lift, or a train that shortens the line would end the claim. That is why a tunnel veto mattered. Without the service tunnel, the Channel had to be swum.

Who was on the beach

A small group met him. Among them was his father, Keith Bushby, a former SAS soldier, and the filmmaker Werner Herzog, who is directing a feature-length documentary on the journey called Walk of Life. Bushby told the BBC it felt good to have UK soil under his feet after all these years. He said it had not been easy, and that the difficulty was part of the point: proving he was more capable than he gave himself credit for. He also said everyone can accomplish more than they imagine.

In a later interview he described the first day in the water. He said he wondered whether he had taken too large a bite, then found a rhythm. He had no Channel training of the kind a sponsored solo swimmer would log. The swim was the method the rules left him, not a race entry.

Hull is still ahead

Dover is not the finish. Bushby has said he expects to reach his childhood home in Hull by early November. In September, while he was still in Belgium, he told the BBC it was definitely time to call it a day and that he did not want to keep the journey going much longer. The remaining line is road, not sea: Kent, the Thames corridor, and the east of England.

The Monday landing closes the part of the route that could have stopped him outright. A man who has already swum the Caspian for 31 days and crossed the Bering Strait still treated the Channel as a separate problem, because the tunnel was shut and the rules forbade a ferry. The clock he set himself in 1998 is now a walk across England, with a filmmaker already on the shingle and a father who has waited 28 years for the return.