top of page

Screen Shot 2021-11-01 at 6.28.42 PM.png

Millican Dalton: A Sublime Midlife Crisis

The relevance of a 20th century cave-dweller to environmental aesthetics.

Wednesday, 23 December 2020

borrowdale pic 1.jpg

At the mouth of the cave at Borrowdale, May 2020. Photograph: Lewis Eaton.

On a swelteringly hot day in the North Western Fells of The Lake District, the gaping mouth of a cave offered itself as a refuge and swallowed us mercifully into its cool damp interior. Caves are otherworldly places. This particular cave, set into the hillside of Castle Crag, allows you to peer out at the gently swaying trees and glimmering daylight of the outside world from a viewing point void of light and sound. The daytrip itself had been to seek refuge in The Lakes; an attempt at replacing the stagnancy of a locked-down city summer with a more welcome, less claustrophobic, kind of tranquillity. We spent a few minutes scrambling around on the siltstone, marvelling at the height of the cave walls and exchanging the obligatory comments about feeling small in big spaces. On leaving, I noticed a large, flat stone covered in scrawlings. At the centre in neat, deeply-etched letters read ‘Don’t Waste Words, Jump to Conclusions’ with dozens of smaller sections of writing surrounding this. Each gave names and dates, with many faded with age and dissolving back into the stone’s surface. It was from a frantic Googling during the car ride home that I came to find out we had happened across a sort-of pilgrimage place for hikers: the cave in which a man had lived out his summers for over forty consecutive years.

In 1904, at the age of thirty-six, Millican Dalton gave up his life as an insurance clerk in London in order to dedicate himself to The Great Outdoors. Having spent part of his childhood in Nenthead, the North Pennines, he found life and work in the capital stifling in comparison. From then on Dalton split his year, spending the summer months in the cave under Castle Crag and winters in a canvas hut in Buckinghamshire. Far from your conventional hermit, Dalton was an active and sociable member of the community. He organised camping excursions for the outdoors novice which included teaching hiking, rock climbing, rafting and how to forage for food. What I found extraordinary for the time was that these excursions didn’t exclude women, with one of Dalton’s advertisements for a mountaineering course stating his views bluntly: “Ladies are welcome to the camp. There is nothing new in ladies camping, the custom being at least 10,000 years old.” This rare indiscriminate approach led to Dalton forging a long-lasting friendship with geologist Mabel Barker, who over the years consistently recommended Dalton’s courses to women students and friends.

Millican and Mabel.jpg

Dalton and Barker atop a needle, 1913. The Mable Barker Collection.

ARCHIVE

Take a look...

Find all our of old features and articles below...

The Book of Mormon: Ringing Doorbells and Knocking on Doors

Hello! My Name is Elder Price And I would like to share with you The most amazing book […] This book will change your life! This book...

Find Me: A Book Review

Find Me: A Book Review

Find Me by André Aciman, 2019 (Cover: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) I love love. Before I set about expressing my unversed and uneducated...

Sustainability on the Runway: Men's London Fashion Week

Sustainability on the Runway: Men's London Fashion Week

Just a week into the new year and the tone had already been set; the calls for a more sustainable way of living were being heralded loud...

An Interview with Elisa de Wyngaert, MoMu Fashion Curator

An Interview with Elisa de Wyngaert, MoMu Fashion Curator

"People make chapters in their lives and then organize it as a narrative" Elisa De Wyngaert is a fashion curator at MoMu, the fashion...

Troy at the British Museum: Myth and Reality

People will always tell stories. It is an obsessive, compulsive, comforting act. I was most recently reminded of this fact at the current...

Art and the Rural: Is there a way for arts and culture to break out of the city?

Art and the Rural: Is there a way for arts and culture to break out of the city?

Illustration by Himarni Brownsword Away from the buzzing activity of bigger metropolitan centres, artists often find their greatest...

London, A Love Letter

London, A Love Letter

A short story based on Lucian Freud's Two Irishmen in W11 (1984) Photo by Aniela Rybak Dear London, I love you. We’ve been through a lot...

Gettin' There: Chapter Three

Gettin' There: Chapter Three

What the Food Illustration by Izzy White There exists one thing that the French enjoy slightly more than complaining about the Brits, and...

A Decade of Fashion: Clothing Trends from the Last 10 Years

A Decade of Fashion: Clothing Trends from the Last 10 Years

With the passing of another decade, it seems to be the ideal time to reflect upon some of the most influential fashion statements of the...

Overheard at Westminster Abbey

Overheard at Westminster Abbey

Westminster Abbey’s walls have been standing for centuries, picking up the gossip of lowly peasants, kings, all the cool boyos, and even...

1

2

bottom of page