DUNSTER, Somerset With its chocolate-box assortment of ancient stone cottages draped around a wooded hilltop, Dunster looks like Christmas every day of the week. At nightfall on December 2, children process through the village in doublet and hose, lighting candle lanterns and transforming every lane into a string of fairy lights.

The medieval mood prevails throughout Friday and Saturday, with carols in the old Yarn Market, craft stalls in the castle grounds and a piggyback quintain tournament at 7.30pm on Saturday — tots for knights, dads for steeds.

Dunster Castle will be joining in too, with candlelit handbell-ringing in its 17th-century stables (from 6pm each evening) and a Deck the Halls event (this Saturday, 11am-3pm).

December 2-3, with the Friday procession at 5pm and festivities (and shopping) until 9.30pm each evening. Call 01643 821425 or visit www.dunsterbycandlelight.co.uk. Dunster Castle admission costs £2/£1 (01643 821314). Spend the night at the Old Priory (01643 821540; doubles from £70, B&B)

TUDOR CHRISTMAS

CHICHESTER, West Sussex The Weald & Downland Open Air Museum takes its Tudor-themed time travel seriously. The museum is a kind of twilight home for rescued historic buildings, so you can lose yourself in a whole village of yule-trimmed farmhouses, manors and mills.

Its Sussex Christmas celebration centres on the working Elizabethan kitchen — smoke-filled, ham-hung and serving time-forgotten sweetmeats, such as prune suckets, marchpane and gingered bread, made with flour from the museum’s working water mill.

Once you’re stuffed, step next door into 15th-century Bayleaf farmstead, and toast the season with a goblet of steaming Lamb’s Wool cider under the Kissing Bunch, a confection of fruit, nuts and greenery that was the prototypal Christmas wreath.

Snuggled away in other cottages, you’ll find chestnut sellers and storytellers, mummers and madrigal singers — to really get into the spirit of the thing, you could wassail your way from door to door. The highlight comes at 3.15pm, with communal carols in one of the half-timbered halls.

Daily, December 26-January 2, 10.30am-4pm; £7.70/£4.10. Call 01243 811348 or visit www.wealddown.co.uk

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