Professor of Adventure

By Karen Barden

Another spring settles in Borrowdale, new woodland daffodils carpet the valley floor and swallows return from hot climes to a peaceful patch of paradise.

Once, they were joined by another familiar figure making his journey home for the summer months. The Cave Man of Borrowdale for nearly half-a-century made two holes blasted from Castle Crag's slate his home.

Millican Dalton died in 1947, yet lives on through legend and the cave which the self-styled action man made his own.

For half-a-crown about 12p he would take eager explorers, many of them women, for a day's escapade. His card read: Millican Dalton, Professor of Adventure, Camping Holidays, Mountain Rapid Shooting, Rafting, Hair Breadth Escapes.'

Kendal's Museum of Lakeland Life stumbled across a photograph of a Robinson Crusoe castaway lookalike, standing with climbing kit and wearing a strange hotchpotch of home-made clothes.

The great Millican Dalton jigsaw had started. It will culminate in a display highlighting a bizarre and unique story of a free thinking guy, who literally dropped out long before it was hip and trendy.

The gallery has asked London's Imperial War Museum to look for letters Quaker pacifist Millican sent from Cave Hotel' to Winston Churchill imploring the Prime Minister not to get involved in the 1939-45 conflict.

As the country is once again gripped by war, attention has returned to the gentle countryman, whose vices rarely, if ever, strayed beyond Woodbines. He followed a dream, and kept it going for the rest of his life.

Millican Dalton, still a relatively young man, got up from his chair one day, walked out of the London insurance office where he worked as a clerk, and never returned. He knew a better life beckoned and went to find it.

A pioneer guide to the Lake District, he was born at Nenthead. His mother's family hailed from Alston and young Millican was sent to the Friends School, at Wigton, moving south to the edge of Epping Forest.

Although his father died when the boy was about seven, he and his several brothers climbed, camped and learned from the great outdoors.

Life as an insurance clerk would have held few attractions for the man moulded by nature and fuelled on adventure.

He built himself a forest hut and earned an honest buck designing, making and selling lightweight tents and equipment and by leading expeditions to Scotland, Switzerland and the Lakes.

It was the Cumbrian fells which succeeded in luring the quiet, thinking man, whose hero was George Bernard Shaw. He shared the author's deep concern for humanity, left wing thinking and strict vegetarianism.

First, he set up home in a tent near Grange-in-Borrowdale, rummaging in the village tip for useful utensils. Village folk accepted the gentle, good-natured confirmed teetotaller, who looked odd and harmed no one.

Just when he moved into the capacious double-cave system, among the old slate quarry workings of Castle Crag, is not certain. This was to be his main home for the rest of his life.

In the coldest months, he would transfer to a wooden hut in the New Forest, returning to Borrowdale with the daffodils and swallows. Rumour has it he cycled between his two residences on an often laden bright-blue bike, which doubled as a wheelbarrow.

Millican did what he could to make Cave Hotel' comfortable. The larger, lower section was his living and dining room, the upper reaches, which he called "the attic", his bedroom. A constant supply of water came from a hole in the roof.

He slept on bracken, the only concession to comfort a down quilt and a patch of woollen red plaid, often seen wrapped around him as he went about his business.

Potatoes were grown on a terrace near the cave's mouth, and wholemeal bread made on fires fuelled by larch, juniper, yew and holly.

He loved spontaneous fun. Once, at midnight, he took three campers down river to Derwentwater, where he often sailed his raft Rogue Herries, named as a tribute to the central character in Hugh Walpole's daring family saga.

Best man at a wedding, he bowed to convention by wearing socks and cooking chicken in the cave for the bridal party despite his vegetarianism in his old billycan.

Sustained by endless supplies of strong coffee and Woodbines, Millican started each day with a bowl of porridge, before walking down to the village for a copy of The Daily Herald.

In January 1941, the Daily Mirror devoted almost a page to Millican Dalton, complete with a picture of him at the cave entrance, festooned with long icicles, and showing him in his shorts. Millican claimed to have invented shorts.

"War can't touch him," ran the story. "He cares nothing for blackouts. His rationing worries are few. His cooking utensils collected from scrap dumps."

Millican told readers he lived mainly on wholemeal bread, which he baked.

"My only luxury is coffee, for which I pay 2s 2d a pound. I sleep on a bed of bracken and need only my plaid and an eiderdown to keep me warm.

"I don't burn a light, though I lie in bed from beginning to end of black out. Seven hours sleep is enough for anyone.

"The rest of the time I just lie and think and listen. You can't feel lonely with nature as your companion."

He survived the war, but not the bitter, fuel-crisis ridden winter of 1947. His winter hut in Marlow Bottom, Buckinghamshire, burned down, so he made himself a tent and moved in it. In his 80th year, he soon developed pneumonia. Although taken to hospital, he died shortly afterwards. It was probably the first time he had a conventional roof over his head for 50 years.

Anyone stumbling across Millican's Borrowdale sanctuary can see carefully carved words chiselled into rock by the entrance:

"DON'T WASTE WORRDS (sic)

JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS"

Millican Dalton's cave really was his castle. He wanted no more from life.

2:50pm Thursday 10th April 2003