The letterhead on the verso of this drawing date it to a period between 1915 and 1923. Mackintosh seems to have made no documented excursions out of London during this period except to Northampton, where he was working on a number of projects of W J Bassett-Lowke, and to Worth Matravers, a village in Dorset where he spent a holiday with his friends Randolph and Birdie Schwabe in 1920. He produced two fine watercolours of the village and its surrounding countryside (both collection of Glasgow School of Art) and it seems likely that this drawing is a preparatory study of the many thatched cottages in the village.