Wikipedia
Dunster is a village, civil parish and former manor within the English county of Somerset, today just within the north-eastern boundary of the Exmoor National Park. It lies on the Bristol Channel coast south-southeast of Minehead and northwest of Taunton. The United Kingdom Census of 2011 recorded a parish population of 817.
Iron Age hillforts testify to occupation of the area for thousands of years. The village grew up around Dunster Castle which was built on the Tor by the Norman warrior William I de Moyon (d. post 1090) shortly after the Norman Conquest of 1066. The Castle is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086. From that time it was the caput of the Feudal barony of Dunster. The Castle was remodelled on several occasions by the Luttrell family who were lords of the manor from the 14th to 20th centuries. The benedictine Dunster Priory was established in about 1100. The Priory Church of St George, dovecote and tithe barn are all relics from the Priory.
The village became a centre for wool and cloth production and trade, of which the Yarn Market, built by George Luttrell (d.1629), is a relic. There existed formerly a harbour, known as Dunster Haven, at the mouth of the River Avill, yet today the coast having receded is now about from the village and no sign of the harbour can be seen on the low lying marshes between the village and the coast. Dunster has a range of heritage sites and cultural attractions which combine with the castle to make it a popular tourist destination with many visitors arriving on the West Somerset Railway, a heritage railway running from Minehad to Bishops Lydeard.
The village lies on the route of the Macmillan Way West, Somerset Way and Celtic Way Exmoor Option.
Dunster can refer to:
- Dunster, Somerset, England
- Dunster, British Columbia, Canada
- Dunster House, dormitory at Harvard University, US
- Dunster, 1992 novel by John Mortimer
- Bill Dunster (born 1960), British architect
- Charles Dunster (1750–1816), British writer and translator
- Chinmaya Dunster (born 1954), English musician and environmentalist
- Frank Dunster (1921–1995), Canadian ice hockey player
- Henry Dunster (1609–1658/9), Anglo-American Puritan clergyman, first president of Harvard College
- Henry Dunster (MP) (1618–1684), English merchant and politician
- Matthew Dunster, English theatre director, playwright and actor
- Robin Dunster (born 1944), Australian nurse, chief of staff of Salvation Army International
- Tomy Dunster, Argentinian actor
Usage examples of "dunster".
By: John Mortimer Category: Fiction Mystery Synopsis: Dunster hero or villain?
This is the gripping story of two men, Dick Dunster and Philip Progmire, locked in an adversarial friendship from their schooldays, at Oxford and on into a harsh world and the shifting grounds of marriage.
It brings us the extraordinary figure of Dick Dunster who drives the story to its climax.
Long after the cessation of hostilities, Dunster and Progmire are at war.
Culminating in a trial scene that only John Mortimer could write, Dunster is a contemporary tale of friendship, love, honour and betrayal.
It was Dunster, supposedly my best friend at school, who looked a fanatic: bright-eyed with a lock of dark hair fallen across his forehead, his unbuttoned mac flapping in the wind and a voice which trembled on the verge of indignation or sarcastic laughter you could never be quite sure which would emerge.
The man on the stepladder should have been grateful as, apart from a few released secretaries and their lovers who paused for a moment on their way to a vacant patch of grass and then walked on, quite uninterested in the end of the world, Dunster and I were his only audience.
He seemed to me to have enough on his plate, what with the rushing wind and the small fires and the Day of Judgement, without having an argument with Dunster to contend with.
You never knew, with Dunster, whether his far-fetched allegations might not have some truth in them.
All of which will make it clear to you that Dunster and I were chalk and cheese, or creatures from different planets.
And there was Dunster, enormously concerned about the slave trade and the Race Relations Act and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, thriving on a series of head-on collisions with the masters and the boys which would have left me trembling with nervous exhaustion.
And yet most of the time, to my amazement and occasional respect, Dunster seemed to achieve, in the centre of his frenzied universe, an absence of anxiety which I had never known.
Dunster and his journalist father occupied, in almost unbelievable chaos, the top two floors of a house in Camden Town which had been the Dunster matrimonial home.
The Dunster cuisine considered almost entirely of bacon and eggs, eaten with doorsteps of fried bread and cups of strong tea, so that about their home the smell of burning fat indicated that a traditional English breakfast was available at all hours of the day and night.
I found this hard to believe, but then it was unsafe to make any assumptions about Dunster, a boy who was full of surprises.