Dunster Castle has stood on its red sandstone hill since Norman times — the Domesday Book records a fortification here — but the building visitors see today is largely a 17th-century country house built around earlier medieval walls. The Luttrell family owned it from 1376 to 1976, and their centuries of continuous occupation give the interior an unusually personal quality: paintings, silver, furniture, and family portraits accumulated over generations rather than assembled by collectors.
The National Trust now manages the castle and its terraced gardens, which descend in stages to a walled garden with the oldest lemon tree in Britain — a claim that sounds doubtful until you see the tree. The views from the upper terraces look out across the Vale of Taunton and on clear days reach the Welsh coast across the Bristol Channel. The castle is open most of the year; the gardens have longer hours.