Millican Dalton

Millican Dalton knew how to make an impression. When a correspondent from the UK’s Sunday Chronicle newspaper came calling in 1933, the self-styled “Professor of Adventure” gave the interview from the lower branches of a beech tree. He was sixty-six years old and clad, as always, in hand-sewn shorts, puttees, and a feathered Tyrolean hat, with a Scotch plaid draped over his shoulders and a cigarette burning between unruly whiskers. He had spent much of the previous decade living in a cave.

“Forty years ago I was working as a clerk in a city office,” Dalton told the newspaperman, “but this was not the life for me. I gave up my job in the commercial world and set out to seek romance and freedom.”

Dalton spent the rest of his life living largely outdoors, wintering first in a forest hut at the edge of Epping Forest in Essex and later in a wooden cabin in the Marlow Bottom valley of Buckinghamshire, and spending his summers