David Mill said he was determined to finish his mission to become the first man to complete a solo and unaided walk from Canada to the North Pole.

Mr Mill, from Kenmore, in Perthshire, has returned to Britain after his latest attempt was thwarted earlier this month.

He recalled how he became marooned when the ice melted into sea water behind him.

Reaching the geographic North Pole from Canada is a very difficult thing, fraught with a lot of problems and dangers

David Mill

Eventually, he dug a runway for a rescue plane to land on.

Mr Mill fell into the freezing water twice and broke one of his boots but said he never gave up or believed he would die.

The 34-year-old said he still believed his expedition was a success and not an "heroic failure".

'Very difficult'

"I'm not a hero so I guess heroic failure is pretty much out," he told a news conference in the Royal Geographic Society in west London.

"How can you possibly fail in undertaking such a project?"

Mr Mill said he had planned for virtually every situation but that he became trapped on an ice floe after walking 185 miles of his planned 375-mile trek and was forced to abandon the journey.

David Mill with his phone and digital camera

He said: "To reach the North Pole would have been foolhardy, it would have been very stupid and I'm neither of those things.

"There was no way back, I couldn't go forward or back, so it was a question of making sure it was safe, safe for me and safe for the pilot."

Mr Mill dug the runway then used his satellite phone and digital camera to send photos of his position to persuade rescue pilots that it was safe for them to land on the ice.

"Reaching the geographic North Pole from Canada is a very difficult thing, fraught with a lot of problems and dangers," he said.

"It's a case of overcoming those. I'm back in one piece, nothing's too amazingly dramatic about it."