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.

Youth

Illustration by Himarni Brownsword

I am raucous and rebellious and want to revel in being young like a pig rolling in shit. I don’t want to be quietly content; I want my happiness to be obnoxious and acid yellow. I want to get drunk and hug a toilet bowl like a long-lost friend. I want to clamber hungrily into sex. I want to pick up stones on the beach and throw them as far as I can and, splash in the shallow with my clothes on. I want to love so big. I want to overwork and I want to do nothing. I want to be unsatisfied and fling myself at more, those four letters that hold the world inside of them, the O cradling promise like a soft baby. I want to go out without a coat on and shiver on the kerb waiting for a lift home. I want to run up to people and jump at them like a dog. I want my hugs to be huge and warm. I want to want, toddler-esque, ‘why?’ in their mouths . I want to run for no reason. I want to shake the floorboards with my dancing. I want to look in the mirror and think I’m hot. I want to rally behind manifestos and be filled with hope, and feel radical by being alive. I want to smoke badly-rolled roll-ups. I want to write poems about all the men who’ll write poems about me. I want to get fucking angry and shake with power, trembling at my body’s limits, feeling a red so massive that my head hurts. I want to be young.