Dunster Castle occupies a steep hill overlooking a Somerset village and the coastal plain beyond. The site may have been defended before the Norman Conquest, but its documented castle began when William de Mohun established a timber motte-and-bailey fortress after 1066. The position helped Norman lords control western Somerset and routes toward Exmoor. A stone shell keep later crowned the motte, while a lower ward contained service buildings, defenses, and the household spaces required by a substantial baronial estate.

The Mohun family developed the castle through the medieval period. During the civil war between Stephen and Matilda, it endured a siege, and thirteenth-century owners rebuilt entrances and other structures in stone. The surviving gatehouse reflects this phase, though much of the medieval fortress has disappeared. Financial difficulties eventually led Joan de Mohun to arrange the estate’s sale. After her death in 1404, the castle passed to Sir Hugh Luttrell, beginning an association between Dunster and the Luttrell family that lasted for more than five centuries.

The Luttrells repaired the medieval buildings and gradually made the site more comfortable. By the early seventeenth century, George Luttrell commissioned a new house within the lower ward. Civil war soon restored Dunster’s defensive role. Royalists took control in 1643, and the future Charles II stayed there in 1645. Parliamentarian forces under Robert Blake besieged the castle for several months before the garrison surrendered in April 1646. Parliament then ordered the defenses slighted, leaving the residence but preventing renewed military use.

Later generations treated Dunster principally as a country house. Eighteenth-century owners remodeled interiors, altered approaches, and landscaped the surrounding grounds. The most extensive transformation came between 1868 and 1872, when George Fownes Luttrell employed architect Anthony Salvin. Salvin added towers, battlements, modern services, and reorganized rooms to create a Victorian residence that appeared to have developed organically from the medieval castle. His work defines much of the building visible today, even though the picturesque exterior incorporates earlier masonry and historic fragments.

Dunster served as a convalescent home for naval and American officers during the Second World War. Postwar taxation and maintenance costs forced changes in the estate, but the Luttrells recovered the house after an interim sale. Colonel Sir Walter Luttrell gave the castle and many contents to the National Trust in 1976. The site now preserves a thirteenth-century gateway, later domestic rooms, terraced gardens, a working watermill, and Victorian alterations. Its history demonstrates how a Norman fortress could survive by repeatedly changing function while maintaining a strong visual connection with its medieval origin.