written by David Ward, arts correspondent.

PETER Macqueen, actor, gardener, moth spotter and diarist, met Millican Dalton, hermit, climber, free spirit and self-claimed inventor of shorts, in a Keswick pub.

Not in person; Dalton had been dead for 60 years when Macqueen spotted, on the wall of The George, a photograph of the man who has since become Macqueen’s posthumous companion. The picture showed a lean figure with a fag in his mouth and Tyrolean hat (with feather) on his head sitting on a rickety home-made raft on Derwentwater.

That fateful encounter happened while Macqueen was performing in three plays in Theatre by the Lake’s 2007 summer season. The relationship has blossomed over the last nine years during which Macqueen has moved from London to Cumbria with his family (and been flooded out of his home by Storm Desmond late last year).

Macqueen will now become Dalton in The Professor of Adventure, a one-man play he has written (in longhand) and in which he stars. It runs at Keswick from March 18 until April 5, and then tours Cumbria and beyond. He has form in one-man shows: a couple of years ago, he performed alone in Old Herbaceous, a play adapted by Alfred Shaughnessy from Reginald Arkell’s novel about the memories of an ageing gardener at a big house. He is still taking that show on the road.

Millican Dalton was born in Weardale in 1867 and went to school in Wigton. Macqueen learned a lot about him from Matthew Entwistle’s biography A Search for Romance and Freedom and did some research of his own, meeting people who had childhood memories of Dalton. All that has gone into the play.

For 90 minutes or so, Macqueen will be alone on stage in a portable cave, making porridge and brewing coffee as he tells the remarkable story of a pacifist who smelled liked a goat, chain-smoked Woodbines and ran away from a safe insurance job in the City to pursue freedom in huts and camps in wild places. For more than 40 years, he spent his summers in a tent and then in a cave at Castle Crag and became known as 'the hermit of Borrowdale,' even though he enjoyed company far too much to be a genuine recluse.

“He sustained himself by teaching people to climb,” said Macqueen, “although he didn’t need much to sustain him so long as he had enough money to buy his Woodbines, coffee, wholemeal flower and few vegetables to supplement those he grew himself. He made his own clothes and tents and raided the local refuse tip at Grange for anything useful.”

The play is not a documentary; it has a dramatic narrative as Macqueen takes the known facts and then deploys his imagination. The play begins with Dalton writing to Winston Churchill in 1940 to complain about an air raid warden who has told him to put his light (a candle and fire) out. Macqueen has attempted to get into the mind of the man as he takes stock on his life while talking to himself and to people who may or may not be with him in the cave as he confronts his age (he’s 73) and the trials of living in his cave through his first Lake District winter.

He remembers, among others, his recently dead brother Henry and Mabel Barker, a noted educationalist who he taught to climb, urging her to remove her skirt to enjoy greater freedom of movement on the crags.

“The stories about him paint him as a wonderful British eccentric,” said Macqueen. “But he was more than that. To turn your back on society and all its rules and regulations and stick with your decision for nearly 50 years shows enormous spirit and willpower. But he didn’t do it because he had to - he did it because it gave him fulfilment and happiness.”

As Dalton says in words Macqueen has given him: “I demand nothing but to live my life on my own as I choose. In my own way, free in my choice of a simple life. On my own, alone.”

Macqueen hopes audiences will find in his telling of the Dalton story much that is relevant today: “He has a lot to offer to us now. He once said that we all eat too much, dress too much, do everything too much and that I think has a meaning for us. He said use is everything.

“Everything I have read describes him as a gentle and kind person, not a mean-spirited, grumpy old drop-out. He was also a great lover of nature and so am I. There is a lot in him that I can identify with.”

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