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...

A Review of A Portrait of a Lady on Fire

A Review of A Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Céline Sciamma’s eighteenth century tale of burning desire seeks to re-centre the female gaze and turn the artist/muse dynamic on its...

Little Women: Is another film adaptation really necessary?

Little Women: Is another film adaptation really necessary?

May Alcott, Fronstpiece Illustration from Part 2 of Little Women, (image: Houghton Library, Harvard University) Little Women was first...

Modern Love: A Declaration of Love in all its Forms

Modern Love: A Declaration of Love in all its Forms

Warning, this is one for the sentimental. For the people who love Nora Ephron, Love Actually and the Metro’s ‘Rush Hour Crush’ column....

'Don't Look Now': Venice in Film

'Don't Look Now': Venice in Film

This article was previously published in the special edition, VENICE (July 2019). ‘Venice is like a city in aspic, wrapped over from a...

John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’: A Hard-Hitting Wake-Up Call

John Carpenter’s ‘They Live’: A Hard-Hitting Wake-Up Call

In ‘The Loop or the Vortex’, Kader Attia reminds us of a limitation Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace were confronted with as they...

‘Velvet Buzzsaw’: Artfully Dodge this Horror

‘Velvet Buzzsaw’: Artfully Dodge this Horror

I am usually the first to avoid horror films, but the trailer for Netflix’s Velvet Buzzsaw intrigued me. A horror film concerning the art...

'Mary Queen of Scots': Women in Tudor Britain

'Mary Queen of Scots': Women in Tudor Britain

As I am currently on the Constructing Empires Constellation Course, I was particularly excited to see two historical movies, Mary Queen...

The Favourite: Duck Racing, Voguing and Sapphism in the Court of Queen Anne.

The Favourite: Duck Racing, Voguing and Sapphism in the Court of Queen Anne.

It’s a Tuesday night at a cinema in Peckham, we’re sat in Screen 4. The atmosphere feels giddy with anticipation for what we’re about to...

bottom of page