Millican Dalton: A Sublime Midlife Crisis
The relevance of a 20th century cave-dweller to environmental aesthetics.
Wednesday, 23 December 2020
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.
Dalton and Barker atop a needle, 1913. The Mable Barker Collection.
Opinion
Nostalgic Arcadia: Cottagecore and its Origins
by Madeline Defilippis | 14 September 2021
Image: @iridessence on Instagram
After the last two years, it’s pretty clear why people need an escape from the everyday. We’ve been stuck inside, banned from seeing our closest friends and family, had to put our lives on hold. During the worldwide lockdowns, people have learnt how to make bread, knit, cook, and sought out other creative outlets that they could do from home. This is the basis for cottagecore: a self-sustaining approach to life through a nostalgic lens, a yearning for the past.
But here’s the issue: when was the period during which cottagecore was meant to have happened? When were women allowed to live alone, dress in $500 strawberry dresses, not work, grow plants and make tiktoks about it? Like a lot of other things on the internet, cottagecore finds it origins in a mélange of desires. It’s only natural to look back at simpler times as humans: the Enlightenment was obsessed with the ancient Greeks, always turning to them for examples of proper forms of education, behaviour, and civil society. The Pre-Raphaelites expressed their desire for a romantic vision of society, in spite of Victorian utilitarianism, through medieval and early Renaissance visual metaphors.
Historically, Nicolas Poussin’s arcadian landscapes represent a similarly imagined past. Poussin used the visual metaphor of arcadia to allude to a ‘golden-age’, one before the invention of civilisation by man ended the idyllic way of life. It is understandable, then, in an age where it is assumed that at some level the pandemic was worsened by humans and their refusal to halt their everyday lives, that people would seek a Narnia-like escape through their door out into nature.
Escapism, however, is not news. The difference between good old-fashioned escapist tendencies and cottagecore, however, is that cottagecore has developed into a lifestyle that encompasses the existing parts of our lives. Cottagecore enthusiasts wear makeup; they dress in flouncy dresses; they live in English cottages. But, they also play Animal Crossing and listen to folklore and evermore by Taylor Swift. Their knitting needles are delivered by Amazon Prime and their baking ingredients are delivered by people who make minimum wage. It’s sort of a non-stop exercise in slow-living and self-care, with a healthy dose of romanticism and dress-up. This is quite the absurdist notion, that one can relinquish their capitalist conveniences –it does not eliminate the fact that cottagecore is untenable without contemporary applications such as Instagram, and services such as one-day delivery.
As I mentioned before, cottagecore is nostalgic living for the contemporary person. It has grown in popularity in the lesbian community on TikTok and there is an account on Instagram called @cottagecoreblackfolks dedicated to envisaging people of colour in what would otherwise be a white dream of the past. For women and femme-presenting people, it’s a chance to avoid the objectification and sexualisation of our bodies in favour of celebration. In the absence of the male gaze, people are able to dress comfortably and in clothes that make them genuinely happy. Cottagecore can also be (as a lifestyle) a sustainable initiative, a significant issue in our everyday lives. It focuses on what the individual can do for the future. Is growing our own food such a bad idea?
This fairy-tale dream is not without its faults. Critics have been quick to remind us that the dream of owning acres of land and farm animals in the past often came with BIPOC handling the manual labour. They certainly did not receive the benefits of this idyllic life, nor were they adequately compensated. Some think of it as the historical ‘gentrification’ of a lifestyle, like in major cities when minority populations are driven out of their neighbourhoods to make way for white residents who want to live on the other side of the tracks.
It’s important to remember the reasons why we’ve left the past behind. Injustices, illness and misunderstandings abound in our history books, and we would do well to learn from them before blindly associating romantic tropes. But, cottagecore is malleable. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach to life, as can be seen by the creators who advocate for it. The primary aim is one of happiness through simplicity of emotion, and with all that goes on in our world, I think we can all see the appeal.