Peter Macqueen
Our celebration of amazing stories and wonderful walks begins in the Lake District – with a man who created a whole host of both.
Playwright, actor and walking, talking embodiment of fabled Lakes character Millican Dalton, Peter shows us around his stone second home.
T’S A FAIR bet that if you’re a reader of this magazine, you’ve probably, at some point, thought about jacking in the rat-race and going to live somewhere closer to nature. Somewhere you can live off the land and be free to roam. Somewhere without rules, or walls. Or an inbox. We tend to think of ‘dropping out’ as a modern concept; a product of the warp-speed intensity of life in the Western world since the 1960s. But the original drop-out, the man who gave up a London life to go walking instead (and in the process, to invent adventure tourism), was born on 20th April 1867. His name was Millican Dalton. And in this special issue dedicated to amazing stories, he’s the star player.
THE WORDSMITH GOAT
Reasons to love Millican Dalton; go. He smelled like a mountain goat, made his own clothes, had a face like tanned leather and subsisted on strong coffee and Wills’ Woodbine cigarettes. He was a vegetarian pacifist who claimed to have invented shorts.
He advertised himself as ‘the Professor of Adventure’, and offered ‘camping holidays, mountain rapid shooting, rafting and hair-breadth escapes’.
He courted scandal by taking mixed-sex groups into the hills. He drifted across Derwent Water on a hand-built raft. He wrote letters to Winston Churchill. He was a wit, a wag and a wordsmith. Today, he is revered by climbers as a founding father of their art.
And best of all, he lived in a cave halfway up one of the most distinct and climbable little fells in the Lake District.
“He was ahead of his time in so many ways, but perhaps it’s his appreciation of nature that seems most modern as we view him now,” says the man I’m walking with.
“Some people have even called me a hermit, just because I live in a cave. I’m not a hermit! Far from it. All sorts of people live in caves. Hermits, mainly.” P E T E R MACQU E E N A S M I L L I CAN DALTON
“He understood how valuable an asset nature was. He wanted to live as part of it, not to master or subjugate it.”
My companion looks a bit like Millican Dalton, and there’s a good reason for that. Actor Peter Macqueen became fascinated by Millican’s legend a decade ago, and in 2016 he wrote and staged a one-man play, The Professor of Adventure, in which he became Millican Dalton. After two sell-out runs at Keswick’s Theatre by the Lake, the show now tours the country on request.
Today, on a perfectly crisp spring day in Borrowdale, Peter and I are heading out of Rosthwaite and up towards Millican’s most famous HQ: the wooded cone of Castle Crag.
“It’s extraordinary to think of him chucking away a good wage in 1904 and taking his chances here,” says Peter as we cross the stepping stones over the River Derwent.
“There wasn’t much precedent for it. People likened him to Robinson Crusoe or Peter Pan.”
Millican was born in 1867 at Nenthead near Alston, where the old county of Cumberland met the Pennines. His Quaker family had acquired wealth through lead mining, and as a child he took to roaming free with his brother Henry.
When Millican was seven, his father died, and his mother relocated the family to Epping Forest in Essex. He might have been deprived of hills but he found the forest just as nourishing. He developed a healthy obsession with tree climbing; he called it ‘ boling’, and his favourite targets were elms.
He headed into London for the respectability of a job as a fire insurance clerk, but had already started to reject conventionality. By 1901 he was living in a tent in the forest, and he and Henry were already embarking on cycling tours of the Lake District.
But in 1904, at the age of 36, he abandoned the job and went all-out for the wilderness. From then on, he spent his winters at a camping ground in Marlow Bottom, Buckinghamshire, and his summers here in Borrowdale – living free, leading groups into the hills for hiking or rock climbing, and strolling or paddling by himself as often as possible.
“He described it as a search for romance and freedom,” says Peter. “But to him these weren’t vague or abstract concepts. He had very clear definitions for them.”
To Millican, ‘romance’ meant exploring one’s passions and creativity to their outer limits; unlocking the full powers of mind and body in a quest for self-sufficiency. ‘Freedom’ meant lack of conformity to society’s expectations.
“He was concerned that as a society we were becoming too driven by want rather than need,” says Peter. “So he made his own clothes on a sewing machine. He made rucksacks that were lighter and more versatile than anything being sold around them. And he would scavenge pots, pans and other practicalities from Grange tip.”
He lived off savings and a small legacy, and although he charged for his guiding services, he would often accept coffee or Woodbines in lieu of cash. As long as he had enough to pop into Rosthwaite or Keswick for good coffee, oats, wholemeal flour and a newspaper, he was happy.
Or as Millican himself put it: “Use is everything. We dress too much, we eat too much, almost everything we do is too much. Put a man to it and see what he can come up with.”
It’s no surprise that this phrase turns up dramatically in Peter’s play, or that A Search for Romance and Freedom is the title of an acclaimed biography of Millican by Matthew Entwistle, which Peter used for much of his research.
But as we climb the steep bank that leads to the cave, I’m conscious that we may be painting a picture of a man who was intense, introspective, even joyless. Far from it. In any account you come across (and there are many), he cuts a positively Puckish figure. He had a cheerful word for everyone, be it the locals of Rosthwaite (including Mrs Plaskett, who ran the village stores that supplied him with his Woodbines) or his clients, who fell utterly under his spell. His favourite place to take them was the cave on Dovenest Crag, just below the summit of Rosthwaite Fell. (Sadly for modern-day Millicanites, the cave has long since collapsed,
“Put a man to it and see what he can come up with.” MI L L I CAN DALTON
and Rosthwaite Fell itself, an awkward spur off Glaramara, is seldom visited by walkers.)
He would undertake death-defying climbs just for the fun of them. He climbed the iconic Napes Needle on Great Gable at least 50 times. On the fiftieth occasion, he carried up sticks to light a fire on the top, so he could brew up one of his sludgy coffees and drink in the views.
At ground level, he got around by bike, and it was his desire to strap his kit to the crossbar that led him to design and make lightweight rucksacks, tents and climbing aids. Again, his driving ethos was minimalism: what was the least he could possibly carry while still having what he needed?
He had a particularly joyous relationship with Dr Mabel Barker, Oxford-educated geologist, avant-garde schoolteacher and pioneering mountaineer. They met when she brought a group of female students up to the Lakes from her school in Saffron Walden.
She commissioned Millican as a guide, and thus began a friendship which lasted for years. They embarked on thrilling mountain adventures together, not just in the Lakes but right across Europe from Skye to the Alps.
Mabel recalled an excursion in which their group was benighted in a blizzard in the Austrian Alps, hailing it as a success because, thanks to Millican’s guidance, “nobody woke up dead”.
“This was an age where mixedsex fraternisation was still frowned upon,” Peter reminds me.
“Particularly in the great outdoors where anything might happen.”
Happily, neither Millican nor Mabel, nor anyone they led, seems to have given a hoot for such conventions. The mountains, they believed, were for everyone, in any combination. Final proof of his mischievous wit comes at the doorway of the upper chamber of his cave, which served as his bedroom. Engraved by his bedside is the peculiar motto: “DON’T!! WASTE WORRDS. [sic] Jump to conclusions!”
That’s the real Millican – witty, impish and delighting in enigma.
And now we’re in his home.
The cave is man-made. Like many features on the slopes of Castle Crag it was forged by the slatequarrying industry that sustained Borrowdale for centuries. It had fallen into disuse by the time Millican occupied it in the early 1900s.
Even without the ghost of Millican Dalton, the cave is spectacular. Peter hand-wrote much of his playscript sitting up here in its depths, or just outside, on the grassy stoop that overlooks the deepest end of Borrowdale. “It was partly from necessity,” he explains. “Our house was flooded out by Storm Desmond, so the cave was actually drier!”
Such was the show’s success that after its run, a special performance was staged here in the cave itself, in a joint venture between Peter, the theatre, and the National Trust, which manages the crag.
As an experience, Peter says, staging it here was “pretty spellbinding.”
The play meets Millican aged 73, in the winter of 1940-41. Normally he would spend his winters down south, but the Blitz was raging and Millican, a committed pacifist, wanted to be as far away from the war as possible. So he took the extreme step of wintering at the cave, despite his advancing years and the harsh conditions.
Millican wrote to Prime Minister Winston Churchill several times during that long, cold winter, asking him to stop the war. The play imagines that his reasons were personal as well as pacifist: he’s had a visit from the Keswick Air Raid Warden and been ordered extinguish his one dim candle for fear it may attract a bombing raid.
For the first time in 40 years, his independence had been challenged. And here in the cave, Peter explores how Millican might have felt about that.