©Colin Shewring / Dylan’s Bookstore collection

By the summer of 1935 Dylan’s lifestyle and drinking were beginning to catch up with him. Following a visit to a doctor who suggested he should rest and lower his alcohol intake, Dylan, accompanied by his friend, the writer and editor Geoffrey Grigson, travelled to a remote cottage near Ardara in County Donegal. Grigson stayed for a couple of weeks before leaving Dylan on his own for the rest of the summer. Dylan relaxed and settled into a routine which included writing every day.

During his stay he worked on short stories and completed six poems including I in my Intricate Image. He also grew a beard. Dylan eventually ran out of money and left without paying the farmer who owned the cottage. This resulted in a temporary falling out with Grigson and with another friend, the poet Norman Cameron, who had suggested the trip and paid off Dylan’s debt to the farmer.

I’m ten miles from the nearest human being (with the exception of the deaf farmer who gives me food), and, in spite of the sea and the lakes and my papers and my books and my cigarettes (although they’re damned hard to get, and I’ve few left of them) and my increasing obsession with the things under the skin, I’m lonely as Christ sometimes and can’t even speak to my Father on an ethereal wave-length. I came here – ‘here’ is a cottage studio, once owned by an American artist, perched in a field on a hill facing the wild Atlantic – with Geoffrey G. (Grigson), but he’s gone back to town. And here is a wild, unlettered and unfrenchlettered country, too far from Ardara, a village you can’t be too far from. Here are gannets and seals and puffins flying and puffing and playing a quarter of a mile outside my window where there are great rocks petrified like the old fates and destinies of Ireland & smooth, white pebbles under and around them like the souls of the dead Irish. There’s a hill with a huge echo; you shout, and the dead Irish answer from behind the hill…..…My days these days are planned out carefully, or at least conveniently, to the clock I haven’t got (if time is the tick of a clock, I’m living in a funny dimension, in an hourless house): I rise at nine, I breakfast and clean up till ten, I read or write from ten till one, I lunch at one, then I walk over the cliffs to the sea and stay or walk about there till half past three or four, then tea, after tea I write until the early dusk, then I climb over the hills to the high lakes and fish there until dark. Back. Supper. Bed. I have a little illegal poteen whiskey with my supper, and I smoke black shag in a bad pipe. One day a week I shall walk ten miles to Glendrumatie where there is a shop and a porter bar. It rains and it rains. (from a letter to Bert Trick, summer 1935)