© Peter Facey and licensed for reuse under this creative commons license.

Dylan and Caitlin stayed at New Inn House, a former pub with thirteen bedrooms and three to four acres of land during the winter of 1937 and in spring 1938. They returned again the following autumn to await the arrival of their first child, Llewelyn Edouard who was born on January 30th 1939 at Dorset Cornelia Hospital in Poole.

Caitlin’s mother Yvonne Mcnamara owned the house and lived there with her daughter, Caitlin’s older sister, Brigit. It was a very different environment to what Dylan was used to at home in Swansea as clothes were stacked on chairs with cats and dogs dozing on them and window frames were warped so the wind whistled through the house. Despite the grandeur of the house, the Mcnamara’s lived in relative poverty and had little money for repairs. Dylan stated in a letter to his friend Vernon Watkins, “It’s almost too cold to hold a pen this morning. I’ve lost a toe since breakfast; my nose is on its last nostril. I’ve four sweaters on (including yours), two pairs of trousers and socks, a leather coat and a dressing-gown.”

However, it was a period when Dylan seemed to work freely in the ‘big room’ overlooking the garden making revisions of poetry and stories from his teenage notebooks. He had a strict routine of working for two to three hours in the morning before the grandfather clock struck twelve and he and Caitlin would take the bus to Ringwood and then return home armed with fizzy drinks and sweets galore – dolly mixtures, bulls eyes, sherbet balls, liquorice allsorts, hundreds and thousands and spearmint chews. He and Caitlin would then spend the afternoon reading to each other and they were spoilt for choice as the house was filled with books, Dylan himself suggested two thousand, though many think this was an underestimate.

The house was demolished in the 1970s to develop a nature reserve.