Dunster drive

After breakfast we went to Dunster by car, to visit the National Trust stately home, dating back to the fourteenth century, transformed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by its wealthy landowning family into a substantial domestic country residence with landscaped gardens. The Bristol Channel is a mile or so away and the castle sits high above the coastal plain beneath the Quantocks on a fifty metre promontory. 

The house interior is largely Jacobean with handsome wooden panelling and stairs, its walls are covered with generations of family portraits. Whether or not you know anything about the people they portray, they demonstrate the way in which portrait painting evolved over three. centuries. The extensive gardens wrapped around the promontory on which the castle stands are stocked with trees and plants from far and wide, and some delightful footpaths weaving their way through tall trees bushes and plants. 

At the bottom is a winding stream with three bridges crossing it, all in different styles. Higher up a side valley the stream feeds a mill leet, leading to a working flour mill, with an overshot double waterwheel and four sets of grinding stones. It used to produce flour from cereals grown on the estate, but as this has been given up in favour of sheep farming organically grown grain is shipped in by the sackful from elsewhere. Ann came away with a bag of oats and Clare with a bag a spelt flour for bread making when we return home

In the valley on the western side is the village of Dunster. It has retained many of its mediaeval buildings and town plan. The mainly fifteenth century Parish Church of St George was once a Priory dating back to the 12-13th century and has an interesting internal layout. The chancel and sanctuary are under the central tower and there's a rood screen a couple of bays into the nave. The east end beyond the tower is furnished with an altar and seating in the form of rectangular stalls to the north south and west, as is found in some collegiate churches with a chapter within the building. The east end lancet windows are characteristic of an eleventh century foundation. None of these features are necessarily original. The nineteenth century restoration of a delapidated church was carried out by neo-gothic revival architect George Edmund Street, keen to impart to his work a sense of its history as a parish church of monastic origins.

In addition to a churchyard on the west and south sides, the land at the east end has been made into a park and garden, and there's a large mediaeval tithe barn on the north east side, renovated in recent decades and now used as a community facility. The narrow road through the village winds past the south boundary wall and in the street beyond passes a fifteenth century building called 'The Nunnery'. The Priory originally had a small number of monks whose residence has long disappeared, and a small number of nuns as well. Like the castle, a great deal of attention has been paid to the conservation of the built environment. Unlike the castle, the village remains populated and economically active with small shops and a post office.

On the way there, we had a fifteen minute traffic queue due to road works to get through the neighbouring village of Carhampton, but on the return trip thankfully, we had a clear run. Beyond Dunster on the way to Minehead are even more major road works, road closures and diversions increasing the travel delay. Fortunately, in the past week the road closure has been transferred from the day time to evenings, much to the relief of all those who go to Minehead for their shopping. At the moment, the steam train runs as far as Dunster, then there's a replacement service using an antique bus the rest of the way. Road works would add to the journey time and make it impraticable for a shopping commute. Road maintenance is vital for rural communities, so heavily car dependent, and tends to get done outside holiday season. It must be awful to live with.

I cooked supper and then we watched 'Have I got news for you' savagely satirical, followed by a romantic black comedy, sort of, coarse and in poor taste. I could have done without it. Scientific advice is openly advocating a return to the kind of minor restrictions in England which still exist in Wales, but Boris is doing his optimistic best to disregard warnings that contagion and hospitalization could again spiral out of control. This totally lacks in common sense, as if he's afraid of losing face politically, simply shrugging off growing concern. One local public health authority is making use of its powers insist on mask wearing in situations it has control of. Let's hope others will follow suit and put to shame the fool at the helm of government.