Karl Bushby steps onto Shakespeare Beach after a 28-year walk from Chile

Karl Bushby put his feet on Shakespeare Beach, just south of Dover, at 15:30 BST on Monday, 5 October. The former paratrooper, now 57, said he had swum for about 20 hours across three days, with rest stops, to cross from France. HM Coastguard said it had worked with French authorities and maritime partners so that safety rules were met. He called the landing the last major obstacle on a walk that began in Chile on 1 November 1998.

The rules he set himself are narrow and have done most of the work of making the journey strange. He does not use transport to advance. He does not go home until the line is finished. Home is Hull, where his mother still lives. His father, Keith Bushby, a former SAS soldier, was on the beach with a small group of friends and family. So was the filmmaker Werner Herzog, who is directing a feature about the walk under the title Walk of Life.

Bushby told the BBC it felt good to have UK soil under his feet, and that the difficulty was part of the point: a test of what he could do. He also said he had crossed with no Channel training. That claim is his. The coastguard confirmation is narrower. It covers liaison and safety protocol, not the number of hours in the water.

The route explains why the Channel was the hard gate and not a symbolic one. He started at the southern tip of the Americas and moved north through the continents on foot, then across water where the land ran out. The Caspian Sea crossing took 31 days. He entered Europe last year. By September he was on the French side of the Channel. Channel Tunnel managers refused him use of a service tunnel, which left the swim as the only way through under his own rules. A ferry would have broken the first rule. A flight home would have broken the second.

He is not finished. His team expects him to start again on Friday and to reach the childhood house in Hull by early November, close to the 28th anniversary of the day he left. The remaining distance is inside England. It is long, but it is road and path, not a shipping lane. The anniversary date, 1 November, is the marker he has used since the start. Arriving in Hull near that date would close the circle on the calendar as well as on the map.

Shakespeare Beach is a specific piece of coast, not a generic Dover postcard. It sits under the cliffs, south of the port. The landing time, 15:30, is precise enough to check against tide and light. The swim length he gives, 20 hours over three days, is not a single continuous crossing of the kind logged by Channel swimming associations. It is a multi-day passage with rests. That distinction matters if anyone later tries to enter it in a record book. Bushby has not presented it as a race record. He has presented it as the only legal way across that still obeyed his rules.

Herzog's presence is a production fact, not a verdict on the walk. A director on the beach means the footage exists. It does not mean the journey is over. The next dated point is Friday's restart, then the house in Hull, then the question of whether the two rules survive the last weeks on English roads.