For nearly half a century Pearson Dalton, a Lakeland shepherd, has lived alone with his dogs, goats and cat in what surely must be the loneliest house in England – 1,600 feet up in the untracked fell at the “back” of Skiddaw. In 1922 he went to Skiddaw House, a former shooting box nearly four mountain miles away from the nearest habitation, on a month’s trial to look after the sheep and has stayed there ever since, through all the long winters of most memories – until the other day. But now Pearson, 75 years of age but still strong, erect and fit, has been compulsorily retired; his employer feels that should anything happen to the old man of the mountains he could be without help for days. And so, the other day, he collected his battered old radio set, his oil lamp, his sticks of furniture and his bedding and loaded them on to a farmer’s jeep that had bumped up the track to the lonely house. In the jeep went his cat – now 13 years old – his nannie goat, rumoured to be 22, had been moved a few days earlier – and Pearson, after a last bit of “tidying up,” looked at his home for the last time, and walked off over the hills into retirement with his five dogs at heel.

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Facebook Twitter Pinterest Skiddaw House, Lake District. Photograph: PR

He took the same route, six or seven miles northwards round the slopes of Great Calva to his sister’s home near John Peel’s Caldbeck, that he has been taking every Saturday for 47 years. This has been his link with civilisation – his weekends among people as a change from his weekdays with rather more than a thousand sheep – and every Monday he has tramped back over the hills to Skiddaw House and five days of solitude – a well-contented man.