Dunster Castle sits on a sandstone outcrop two hundred feet above the village - a hill that, in the early medieval period, had the sea lapping at its foot. William de Mohun, a Norman warrior arrived with William the Conqueror, built his timber keep here within twenty years of 1066 and held it for the conquerors. The de Mohuns kept the castle for three hundred years, rebuilt it in stone, defended it through the Anarchy. In the 1370s they sold it to a family called Luttrell, who held it for six hundred years more. Successive generations made the castle their own - turning it from grim fortress to comfortable country house, expanding the gardens, adding the elegant interiors that visitors see today. After Alexander Luttrell died in 1944 the family could not afford the death duties; the estate was sold to a property firm and the Luttrells lived on as tenants in their own house. They bought it back in 1954 and then, in 1976, Colonel Walter Luttrell gave Dunster Castle and most of its contents to the National Trust. It has been open to the public ever since.

Most of medieval Dunster was paid for by wool. By the 13th century the village had a chartered market dating from 1222 and was producing a distinctive kind of broadcloth that traders across England simply called 'Dunsters'. The profits from that trade built the tower on the Priory Church of St George, paid for the cobblestones underfoot, and in 1609 funded the building of the octagonal Yarn Market that still stands at the top of the high street - a covered space where cloth could be displayed and sold whatever the Somerset weather. The harbour that exported all this cloth, Dunster Haven, lay at the mouth of the River Avill. The coast has since receded; the marsh that runs between the village and the modern beach used to be water. You can still walk Gallox Bridge, a 15th-century packhorse bridge built so that the wool trains could cross the Avill without wetting their loads.

The Benedictine priory was founded around 1100 by William de Mohun, who gave the church and its tithes to the great abbey at Bath. The monks built their priory just north of the church and shared the building with the parishioners - one church, two congregations, much friction. The dispute became so bitter in the 15th century that someone built a wooden rood screen straight down the middle of the nave, dividing the church in two. The monks took the east end; the villagers took the west. The screen is still there. The Priory Church of St George contains 12th and 13th-century work beneath its mostly 15th-century surfaces, and one of its roof beams has a hole in it that locals will tell you came from a Royalist cannonball during the Civil War. The priory itself was dissolved in 1539, but the dovecote that fed it survives - a circular stone tower whose 16th-century revolving ladder, mounted on a pin in a metal cup, has never required oil in nearly five hundred years.

Every May 1st, a strange figure called the Minehead Hobby Horse - a man inside a wooden frame draped in painted ribbons - dances his way from Minehead two and a half miles down the road to Dunster and is received at the castle gate. A 1863 newspaper account thought the custom remembered a phantom ship that drifted into Minehead harbour with neither captain nor crew. Others say it is older still, an ancient May figure, the King of the May. Nobody is quite sure. The 175th Dunster Show, held every August, is similarly insistent: livestock, hedge-laying, the same families showing the same cattle their grandfathers showed. The Ashen Faggot ritual on Christmas Eve at the Luttrell Arms - which started life in 1443 as a guest house for the Abbot of Cleeve - involves burning a bundle of ash sticks bound with green withies, each band's snapping marking a round of toasts. Dunster does not so much preserve its past as inhabit it.