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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.

'The first thing you see is a large phallus' - 'Abstract Erotic' curators at The Courtauld - video

Sep 4, 2025
1 min read

Updated: Sep 12, 2025

By Tien Albert

In the 60s, many celebrated the female nude as an expression of sexual liberation. However, some women artists like Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Alice Adams, rejected art they saw as ‘titillating’ male audiences. Instead, they embraced the ‘Abstract Erotic’, which kept sexual overtones whilst displaying non-figural subjects. They were the only three women to display in 'Eccentric Abstraction', a seminal 1965 exhibition.

60 years later, The Courtauld Gallery has dedicated its latest exhibition to the three artists, and their works throughout their careers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBOxIiRGta8

The Courtauldian's editor Tien Albert interviewed the exhibition's curators, Prof. Jo Applin and Dr. Alexandra Gerstein.

Director/script: Tien Albert

Camera/audio: Saman Deev

Editor: Gus Donald

With special thanks to The Courtauld Institute and Gallery, Prune Engérant, Ruby James, Jo Applin and Alexandra Gerstein.

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