top of page

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...

Nicole Krauss

Nicole Krauss

This article was previously published in the special edition, ALUMNAE (December 2018). MA 1998 Nicole Krauss is an inspirational figure...

Betty Churcher

Betty Churcher

This article was previously published in the special edition, ALUMNAE (December 2018). 1932 - 2015 MA 1977 Artist, art critic, television...

Jane Ferguson

Jane Ferguson

This article was previously published in the special edition, ALUMNAE (December 2018). MA 1975 Few have been so devoted to The Courtauld,...

Anita Brookner

Anita Brookner

This article was previously published in the special edition, ALUMNAE (December 2018). 1928 - 2016 BA 1949, PhD 1952 If the average...

Olivia Laing on the Art of Being Alone

Olivia Laing on the Art of Being Alone

This article was previously published in Issue 20, ISLANDS (March 2019). Following a difficult breakup and a transatlantic move to New...

Never Built New York (Metropolis Books, 2016)

Never Built New York (Metropolis Books, 2016)

Author's own photograph It is the nature of a city not to be complete. There are endless routes that city planners, architects and...

David Hockney (Tate Publishing, 2017)

David Hockney (Tate Publishing, 2017)

Author's own image Hockney. He doesn’t need his first name. The hair, the glasses, the colours – his art is as recognisable as it is...

That Continuous Thing: Artists and the Ceramics Studio, 1920 – Today (Tate Publishing, 2017)

That Continuous Thing: Artists and the Ceramics Studio, 1920 – Today (Tate Publishing, 2017)

Author's own image Wet clay is a messy material. It fills the creases between your fingers. It gets under your nails. Drying on the back...

Architecture Week: After Grenfell

Architecture Week: After Grenfell

It's hard to know what to say or do after an event like the Grenfell Tower fire. In this list, we've collected some of the the most

Architecture Week: Invisible Cities

Architecture Week: Invisible Cities

How does literature provide us with new strategies of imagining our relationship with urban environments? Tom Powell discusses Italo Calvino

1

2 3

bottom of page