The “Luttrell Arms,” a famous hostelry, noted alike for its good cheer and for its interesting architectural details, stands opposite the Yarn Market. Legends, all too often, but by no means always, picturesque lies, have it that this noble fifteenth-century building was originally a “town house” of the Abbots of Cleeve; and they may in this case well tell us truly, for the massive carved-oak windows of the kitchen, looking on to the little courtyard, have a distinctly ecclesiastical feeling. But whoever it was owned the place, he was at pains to make the entrance-porch defensible, as may yet be seen in the arrow-slits contrived in the stonework on either side. The so-called “Oak Room” is perhaps less clerical in effect, but is nobly timbered, with oak hammer-beam roof in three bays. A curious early seventeenth-century mantelpiece in plaster-work, with hideous figures on either side, displays as central feature a medallion relief representing the classic story of Actæon torn to pieces by his dogs, or, this being a hunting country, shall we say his hounds? It is a very small and thin Actæon, and they are very large hounds that have got him down and are urgently seeking some meat on him. Dunster, as already hinted, is a place not readily exhausted, nor lightly to be hurried through. Curious old houses, notably the so-called “High House,” await inspection, and below the Castle, not always found by hurrying visitors, is the rustic old Castle Mill, with an overshot and an undershot waterwheel, side by side, tucked away from casual observation beneath tall trees. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XIX MINEHEAD, NEW AND OLD—SELWORTHY—THE HORNER Scarce two miles distant from Dunster is Minehead, the hamlet of Alcombe lying between the two. Minehead, a group of three so-called “towns,” Quay Town, Lower Town, and Upper Town, occupies a position on the gently curving flat shore sheltered on the West by the bold, abrupt headland of North Hill, rising to a height of 843 feet. North Hill is so striking a feature in all views of the town, that one comes unconsciously to regard it as the only typical outstanding feature of the place. It is, so far as pictures go, Minehead. A noble hill it is, with the old quayside houses of the original fisher-village and ancient little port nestling beneath it. Immemorially a swelling green hillside, seamed and lined irregularly with hedgerows roughly into a chessboard pattern, it is distressing nowadays to find it being studded with villas and scarred with roads.