Written in March 1943 and left incomplete at the time of his death in 1948, it is an account of a walking tour Welch took in the summer of 1933, when he was eighteen.

Picaresque and episodic[4] in nature, Denton's adventures include encounters with a tramp, a young man who attempts to con him out of money, various (sometimes none-too-hospitable) youth hostel proprietors and members of his own extended family, invariably on a quest for a bed for the night.

Parts of the journey are lost to him, as he frankly remarks in the narrative: recounting his arrival at Castle Cary, Somerset ("I think because I liked the name"[5]) he states that "I can remember nothing until I emerged at the market place at Dunster"[6] some 50 miles away.

Additionally, the second half of his completed and published short story "The Barn" (written around the same time as I Left My Grandfather's House) revisits the same theme, Denton becoming a nine-year-old and the teenager transformed into an older, but still youthful, tramp.

I Left My Grandfather's House was first printed in 1958 by the Lion and Unicorn Press at the RCA (the Journals having been published in abridged form 1952 without this text).