In the centre of the long main street is the yarn-market, a beautiful wooden building of the seventeenth century, built by Sir George Luttrell when Dunster was still a centre of the wool industry. It is built with wide overhanging caves, pierced by eight little dormer-windows, with a lantern at the apex of the roof, and is a unique little building whose characteristic features have been sketched and photographed many scores of times, and is comparable, perhaps, only with the butter-market at Bingley in Yorkshire. Opposite is the Luttrell Arms, a quiet, comfortable, harmonious stone building of the eighteenth century, but with part of the older building still preserved inside--a wall that overlooks a paved court, with windows set in frames of beautiful carved oak, and a gabled roof, a moulded plaster over-mantle also, and yet with that general air of disregard for these treasures, amid a hurrying to and fro with plates and bottles, which, to me, is one of the special charms of these long-established country inns.
To anyone who loves England, and that beauty which is so characteristically English, where the life of the present day is visibly linked with the life of the past through long centuries of security, where age has ripened all, the great old trees, the colours of old oak and weather-beaten tiles and warm brick, has gently undulated straight lines, and softened all sharp angles, where the very sunlight has the mellowness of old wine, to a mind perceptive of this peculiar and intimate charm of England, Dunster makes a special call, set amid the suave curves of its rich country, crowned by its ancient castle, dignified by its old, beautiful church (grown, like the castle, through Norman and Early English and Perpendicular styles of architecture), yet intimate and familiar, and beautiful most of all because of the use and wont of daily life within its walls.
It is curious in this twentieth century of ours, when every corner of the habitable globe is docketed, measured, mapped, and surveyed, when a railroad runs across "darkest Africa," and the great ice-wall of the Antarctic cannot keep its inviolability from the feet of those resolute and heroic explorers who go with camera, microscope, and theodolite, against such forces of Nature as would daunt anything but the resolute human heart--it is curious to come across small corners of the world where the law of nations seemingly does not run, and the current of the modern world sweeps by, leaving them in a backwater, strangely aloof and undisturbed.