Allerton Park is open from 8am-Sunset. Plan accordingly. They are also closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, and New Years Day.
Logging Requirement - Post a photo with the Sun Singer and a piece of paper with your caching name and date on it. You can be in the photo if you want but you don't have to be. Instead include a personal item such as your gps, car keys, or some signature item. Goal is to make your photo unique. NO Photoshopped photos!!
By Carl Milles (1875-1955). The bronze sculpture stands at 15’2” high.
Carl Milles created three colossal Sun Singer statues: one in Stockholm, commissioned in 1919 by the Swedish Academy of Sciences to honor the influential poet-patriot Esaias Tegner (1782-1846), who did so much to bring Norse sagas and Scandinavian literature to the public; another in National Memorial Park south of Falls Church, Virginia, in the Washington, D.C., area; and this one at Allerton Park.
Tegner’s prolix romantic poem “Song to the Sun” abounds in references to ghosts, angels, vassals, warriors, avengers, and the Almighty. But for his tribute Milles chose Apollo, the Greek god of the sun, music, poetry, and civilization, depicting him as a nude youth greeting the radiant morning sky with song and extended arms. On his helmet is the rearing horse Pegasus, and under his right foot, the tortoise, an allusion to the first lyre, made of tortoise shell by Hermes and given to Apollo. On the base, in the archaic Greek style popular in the 1920s, are draped and nude figures rendered in low relief-the Muses often associated with Apollonian festivities.
Allerton saw the first Sun Singer on the Stromparterre overlooking the Stockholm harbor in 1929 and personally sought out Milles in his suburban Lidingo studio to commission a reduced-scale version for himself. Misunderstandings about size, however, developed because of language difficulties, and when this spectacular figure in all its enormity arrived from Sweden, John Allerton remembered that he and his father were “flabbergasted.” Scrapping their plan to put it close to the house, where the Apollo would have seemed to be looking directly into a second-story window, it was set in 1932 in a wide circular base surrounded by low shrubbery in the dramatic isolation of an enormous meadow at the farthest end of the estate. Two farmhouses had to be moved to provide an unobstructed site. Both the landscaping and base, an adaptation of the symbolic Altar of Heaven in Peking, are John Allerton’s designs.
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Virtual Rewards 3.0 - 2022-2023
This Virtual Cache is part of a limited release of Virtuals created between March 1, 2022 and March 1, 2023. Only 4,000 cache owners were given the opportunity to hide a Virtual Cache. Learn more about Virtual Rewards 3.0 on the Geocaching Blog.