Monksilver

The Inn Beside the Stream

A stream runs beside Front Street, and the Notley Arms stands close enough that its beer garden is bounded on one side by running water. The pub is a mid-19th-century country inn, roughcast over rubble, with sash windows, louvred shutters and a gabled side porch. Inside it keeps six en-suite rooms, which makes it a place to stay as well as eat.

The kitchen bakes its own bread and cures its own ham. The sample menu runs to wild mushroom and spinach arancini, honey home-roasted ham with free-range eggs and duck-fat chips, truffle fregola, pheasant sausages with mash and onion gravy, and a steak-and-kidney pudding. There is Exmoor-ale-battered cod, and lemon posset or treacle tart to finish. St Austell Tribute is the regular cask ale, with a couple of changing beers alongside. Dogs are allowed, there are highchairs and a children's menu, and the garden has a pétanque piste. One guest, writing in January 2026, put it plainly: "Fantastic food, drink and hospitality highlighted our stay."

A Village of Lost Inns and Cottages

These days the village has no shop. The Old Post Office, a thatched cottage from the early 17th century, sold groceries and stamped letters from the early 1800s until the late 20th century, and is now a private house. Half Moon Cottage, also thatched and older still, was the Ram Inn in 1675 and the Half Moon Inn by 1785 before it became a home around 1860 — the same year the Notley Arms was rebuilt as the village pub.

The village is tightly knit, colour-washed stone cottages under thatch and slate at the foot of the Brendon Hills. The National Park boundary runs straight through it along the B3188, so half of Monksilver is inside Exmoor and half is not.

All Saints and the Coleridge Way

All Saints, Grade I listed, stands in the village. Some of its stonework is 12th century; the west tower is 14th, its stair turret 15th, and the whole was restored and the tower crenellated between 1843 and 1863. Inside are a 15th-century font, 16th-century bench ends, a Jacobean pulpit brought in from elsewhere, and a poor box dated 1634. The gargoyles outside are described in the listing as some of the most entertaining in the county.

Monksilver sits on the Coleridge Way, the 51-mile route across the Quantocks, Brendon Hills and Exmoor, and is the point where responsibility for the trail passes from Somerset Council to the national park. Eastward it is 4¾ miles to Bicknoller over field paths and old lanes, crossing the West Somerset Railway and the A358. Westward the path climbs for about 1¼ miles through oak woodland toward Luxborough.

Monks, Cloth and Domesday

The name means Monk's Wood, from the Latin silva, after the monks of Goldcliff Priory who once held the land. The parish was a cloth-making place, and the trade survives now only in field names. When the Domesday surveyors came through they counted twenty-nine households and valued the three estates here at six pounds.

By car it is seven miles to Dunster, nine to Minehead and thirteen to Taunton, which has the nearest railway station; there is no scheduled bus, though the demand-responsive Slinky service can be booked with registration and at least 24 hours' notice. Cleeve Abbey at Washford and Dunster Castle, with its working watermill, are nearby.

A Village Tradition

Local tradition holds that Sir Francis Drake married Elizabeth Sydenham in this church. It is the kind of story a village keeps whether or not it can prove it, and Monksilver keeps it.