The Yarn Market stands in the middle of the High Street, octagonal and roofed, its timber frame resting on a central stone pier about nine metres across. George Luttrell built it in 1609 as a covered place to sell local cloth, and Francis Luttrell repaired it in 1647; that date and his initials are still on the weather vane. Traders once laid out kerseymere here, a coarse long-wool cloth that became known simply as "Dunsters." You can walk under it and out the other side, which gives you the first sense of the village: everything close together, and the castle watching the whole time from its wooded hill to the south-west.
West Street and the High Street form the spine, red sandstone and pale render, and three pubs sit within a short walk of each other. The Stags Head, on West Street, occupies a fifteenth-century building and leans into being a pub first. Nigel and Janie took it over in July 2023 and reopened it in stages after several closed months, and the kitchen turns out real-ale-battered fish and chips, an 8oz Exmoor-beef Stags Burger, local-pork bangers with horseradish mash, Dartmoor venison cottage pie, salmon-cod-and-haddock fish pie, Korean chicken wings, salt-and-pepper squid, and baked Camembert with hot honey and chilli. There is a garden, cask ale and real cider, and the ales change, so it is worth asking what is on rather than arriving with a preference. Dogs are, in the owners' word, adored.
The Foresters Arms sits nearer the castle, angled towards walkers as much as residents. It keeps a skittle alley, a games room, a pool table, live music and a pub parrot that is sometimes noisy. The food is home-cooked with a changing specials board: chilli, scampi, burgers, sausages, steak, lasagne, pasta bakes, and lighter baguettes and ploughman's lunches. Two cask beers rotate rather than sitting as a house line, Otter among the more popular, with real cider and a beer garden, and dogs are welcome.
The Luttrell Arms is the third, and it is two things at once — a privately owned country-house hotel and a genuine old pub. The bars are small and fire-warmed, with an old stone fireplace and settle in the main room and a seventeenth-century plaster ceiling in the lounge. Its restaurant, Psalter's, holds an AA rosette and takes its name from the medieval Luttrell Psalter; the bar keeps to traditional bar food and four real ales, with a secluded garden that looks towards the castle. Dogs are welcome in the bar but not in Psalter's. On Christmas Eve the hotel burns an ashen faggot, a bundle of ash stakes bound with strips of bark and set alight as a West Country cousin of the Yule log, a custom revived here in 1935. The inn is late medieval and Grade II* listed, and it turns up in Lorna Doone, where Blackmore parked some of his action.
For everything between meals, the village is unusually well supplied. The Deli, run by Belinda and Graham, is the practical heart of any self-catering stay: made-to-order sandwiches, pies, pasties, Scotch eggs, sausage rolls and quiches, local cheeses, bread, milk, fruit and vegetables, honey, jams and chutneys, plus more than a hundred local beers, ciders and wines and a run of local gins. The Little Box of Delights is a proper sweet shop with jar sweets — Blackjacks, flying saucers, pear drops, sherbet, rhubarb-and-custard — alongside slab toffee, buttered Brazils and handmade fudge. The Chocolate House occupies the hall of The George, a coaching inn built in 1323 and used as one for roughly four centuries; it sells chocolate and fudge, Italian pastries, Turkish confectionery, hot chocolate and affogato, and around thirty Marshfield organic ice-cream flavours, with free ice cream for dogs and babies.
Tearooms are the other Dunster habit. Tessa's Teashop, a long-running family business in a sixteenth-century room with a courtyard and space for bicycles, does vegan burgers, meat pies, seasonal salads, homemade cakes and cream teas, and welcomes dogs. Lock's Victorian Tearooms, run by Jeff and Sarah in an old schoolroom or its garden, serves cream teas and three-tier afternoon tea, and its six scone varieties include ginger with cream and honey and a blue-cheese scone with cream cheese and cider-apple chutney. Cobblestones has a large garden with castle views and does breakfasts, light lunches and Sunday roasts, dogs allowed in the front section and outside. Born Appetite fills a converted Methodist chapel and takes its drinks seriously: Miles coffee from Porlock, Somerset and Devon wines, Cotleigh and Red Rock beer, Sheppy's and Luscombe cider, Tarquin's gin and Black Cow vodka. If you want a full dinner, Hathaway's is a candlelit, twelve-cover Italian and Mediterranean restaurant in a sixteenth-century cottage using Exmoor meat and South West fish; at that size, booking matters.
The shops repay a slow walk. David Deakins paints marine and landscape oils with a palette knife, often while visitors watch, and his father painted Dunster for about thirty years before him. Jeni makes pottery, lampshades and cards on site at Made in Dunster. The Crooked Window, in a fifteenth-century building, is run by a working jeweller called Bob who does repairs and commissions and mixes antique and modern jewellery with Japanese and Chinese ceramics. Brothers Chris and Cliff opened Home Coming in 2004, and the Black Knight above the door survives from an earlier shop on the site. Hummingbird stocks Emma Bridgewater, Annie Sloan and Jellycat in a seventeenth-century listed building; Chatelaine Antiques, run by Jill, ranges across furniture, engravings, china and small objets de vertu; and Number 29, run by Sue, sells women's clothing across sizes. The Surprises Shop is a village institution — its longtime proprietor, Gerry Routley, once reckoned he had spent seventy-three years in business there.
When you want to leave the streets, the walks start at the door. The National Trust's castle-village-river circuit is only 1.4 miles and about forty-five minutes, threading the River Avill, Gallox Bridge, the working watermill, the church precinct, the tithe barn, the dovecote and back to the Yarn Market — the best short way to see how the pieces fit. Grabbist Hill is a stiffer 2.5 miles through ancient woodland to views over Dunster, Minehead and the Bristol Channel, with dogs kept on short leads. Conygar Tower, a roofless folly, was built in 1775 by Richard Phelps for Henry Luttrell purely as an eye-catcher; it never had stairs or a roof, so it was never anywhere to stand and look out from, and its name joins the old words for rabbit and enclosure. On Gallox Hill, at 699 feet, the Iron Age fort called Bat's Castle was identified in 1983 by local boys who found eight coins dated between 102BC and AD350. For an easier outing, the Tall Trees Trail at Nutcombe Bottom is a step-free 600 metres past a 150-year-old Douglas fir that measured 63 metres in 2024, England's tallest magnolia and Britain's tallest dawn redwood. Dunster Beach is about 1.3 miles off, its Second World War pillboxes a reminder that the sea is now well away from the medieval centre.
That distance from the coast is the key to the older Dunster. There was a harbour here, first documented in 1183; it was silting by 1307, still took a 57-ton vessel in 1375, and was steadily replaced by Minehead until the market town found itself roughly two miles inland. The castle above it began as William de Mohun's timber fort on a Saxon hillfort after 1066 — almost nothing survives of it but the thirteenth-century lower gateway and its iron-bound oak doors. The Luttrell family bought the estate in 1376, built the gatehouse around 1420 and raised a Jacobean mansion in 1617; in November 1645 the Royalist garrison held out through a 160-day siege before Cromwell's men pulled down the curtain wall in 1650. Anthony Salvin recast the house in 1868 with towers and battlements and a bathroom with hot running water, and the family gave it to the National Trust in 1976. One older story survives with a name attached: John de Mohun V was given a white charger called Grisel Gris by the Black Prince for his courage at Crécy in 1346.
The Priory Church of St George, Grade I listed and built of the same red sandstone, carries a tall four-stage tower over the village. A 1442 contract names its builder as John Marys of Stogursey, paid thirteen shillings and fourpence a foot and a pound for each pinnacle, and he finished it in three years. Inside is a late-fifteenth-century carved oak rood screen of fourteen unequal openings, said locally to be the longest medieval screen in England, along with de Mohun and Luttrell memorials and a sixteenth-century font carved with the Five Wounds of Christ. Near the church, the Grade II* dovecote holds more than five hundred nest holes behind walls 1.2 metres thick; it fed squabs to the Benedictine priory and stayed in use until about 1870, and its revolving potence is a replica of the original. Gallox Bridge, a scheduled packhorse crossing first documented in 1475, takes its name from the nearby gallows and the lord's right to hang thieves — its two narrow pointed arches carried wool ponies while carts kept to the ford beside it.
The mill is still grinding. Milling stopped in 1962 and the National Trust brought it back into regular production in 2014 on two overshot wheels; the upper wheel was replaced in 2026 at a budgeted £58,000 and some five hundred hours of work by named craftspeople, among them millwright Ian Clark and carpenter Adam Marriott. Getting here is straightforward once you accept that the trains are a treat rather than a timetable: the village sits just off the A39 about three miles from Minehead, the year-round First Bus 28 runs through from Taunton's railway station, and the West Somerset Railway's Dunster station — a heritage line, so check the running calendar — stands about a mile out. Pevsner thought the place "unsurpassed in Somerset amongst small towns."
For all the listed stone, the village keeps working at ordinary things. At his studio you can watch David Deakins lay oils on with a knife, in the same streets his father painted for thirty years.