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Millican Dalton: A Sublime Midlife Crisis

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

Wednesday, 23 December 2020

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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.

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

Nov 17, 2019

Ian McKellen on Stage: Tolkien, Shakespeare, Others and YOU!

After queuing for an hour on a cold morning with other theatre enthusiasts, my sister and I managed to get two seats (for as little as 10 pounds) for Ian McKellen’s one-man show at Harold Pinter Theatre. The performance is a continuation of the UK tour celebrating his 80th birthday. The show will run until February 2020 in London, visiting eighty venues around the country. All the profits go to charities dedicated to theatre.

Gandalf, King Lear, and Richard III are only a few of the many personalities Ian McKellen has adapted throughout the many years of his acting career. However, during the two and a half hours, we can mostly encounter the actor himself: talking about his first experience with theatre, telling what happened behind the scenes of The Lord of the Rings, how he met the Queen or what plays he did at university.

Poster for Ian McKellen On Stage (Courtesy of Harold Pinter Theatre)

The best part of the night is probably how it makes you feel as if you are watching someone that you have known for a really long time, but somehow, it is actually the first time you are encountering them in person. McKellen interacts with the audience as much as possible, perhaps by inviting one girl up on stage or asking everyone to list all of Shakespeare’s plays. The performance is a conversation alternating between poems and extracts from plays, which makes it a perfect balance between theatre and stand-up comedy.

By the end of the evening, I left feeling entertained and extremely positive. It was an absolutely unique experience to see such an iconic figure on stage in a relaxed performance. If you consider yourself a hardcore fan of The Lord of the Rings or a theatre lover, this is a show that cannot be missed!

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