Professor Of Adventure

Cross Bike Ride

Alone

19th October route

Last day of our little Lakeland break and the run of agreeable weather is continuing, a pleasant  canvas of green, blue and grey  gradually being overlaid with the russet colours of autumn. I thought I had better give the cross bike an airing today, seeing as it has been usurped by the mountain bike and even, the walking boots, all week. Not content to stick solely to tarmac, it seemed today would be a good day to visit a Lakeland attraction I have been meaning to visit for many years - Millican Dalton’s cave. Despite the amount of time spent in Borrowdale over the past fifty odd years, I had never got round to finding it, or even looking for it, apart from the failed attempt earlier in the week, where we took the wrong path and found the wrong cave. 

Millican Dalton called himself Professor Of Adventure, a forerunner of today’s outdoor instructors, taking clients camping, climbing, rafting, scrambling and “hair’s-breadth escapes”. At the age of 36, he left his job as an insurance clerk to live in a hut in Buckinghamshire before moving to the Lake District. He began living in a cave on the side of Castle Crag in the 1920’s, dropping out of regular society, like the hippies forty years later, for a life of self sufficiency, making his own clothes, baking his own bread and following a healthy natural diet, if you don’t count the Woodbines cigarettes. He also designed and manufactured lightweight camping equipment. Contemporary accounts paint a picture of an engaging gentleman, a conversationalist, by no means reclusive or anti-social. He lived in the cave for the rest of his life, moving into a hut only in cold winters, until he was 79 years old, when the fags caught up with him and he died of heart failure and bronchitis. Although dropping out to live a natural life is now an acceptable choice in the 1920’s he must have been almost unique but his eccentricity seems to have been accepted. Although what the local quarrymen and miners, who worked in the harshest of conditions everyday, made of someone living, by choice, in a draughty cave, is anyone’s guess.

For the third time this week, I panted up the hairpin bend above Hawse End, passing the Catbells bridleway on this occasion, sticking with the tarmac all the way to Grange, pausing only for the mandatory bike, bench, lake pictures. Down the hill into Grange, swerving round death-wish walkers who don’t appear to grasp the danger of walking down the middle of a relatively busy road. I took the track beside the Steamy Fart Cafe and headed past the campsite and down to the river, looking a lot less fierce than the beginning of the week. Millican Dalton’s cave is off the track which runs between Grange and Rosthwaite and proved quite easy to find, although impossible to ride to on a cross bike. Well, impossible for me, I’m sure there are some people who might find loose and slippery rocks, vertical slopes and wet roots the sort of challenge they relish. Shouldering the bike, I plodded upward until the cave came into view, surprisingly large but not looking in the least bit comfortable. No trace remained of any adaptations which might have made things more homely, a hot tub would have been a nice addition, grand views across the valley to Bowder Crag. I didn’t feel any resonance with one of my childhood heroes in the cave, it is just a big hole in a cliff, with some signs from the council forbidding the lighting of fires. The efficiency of the signs can be measured by the number of stone rings filled with charcoaled branches spread around the area like blackheads on a teenager’s face. 

Rejoining the main track, I headed toward Rosthwaite, stopping here and there to look into lesser caves until the track became more rideable, in a sort of uneven rocks, vibration white finger, loose fillings, detached retinas, Paris To Roubaix fashion. From Rosthwaite, smooth tarmac led me back to Keswick, past our Borrowdale valley, climbing playgrounds, Black Crag, Shepherds Crag, Falcon Crags, then following the eastern shore of Derwentwater, trying not to be too distracted by the views and plunging off the road into the lake. Soon I was back in Keswick, a Keswick Millican Dalton would probably still be able to recognise from 70 years ago, it’s hard to imagine what a man who made his own clothes in a cave would have made of today’s “adventurers” wearing £400 jackets to wander round the shops before dirtying their boots with a stroll to Friar’s Crag.