This former supermarket-turned-furniture-shop was built during the area’s redevelopment in the 1960s. Until then, the Railway Inn had been on the site, since 1913. It replaced an earlier inn of the same name which stood where there are now traffic lights outside this pub. The present pub is named after the buccaneer, explorer and naturalist, who was born at nearby East Coker, in 1651. Dampier was the first person to circumnavigate the world three times.

Text about literary links in the area

The text reads: An incident in the career of locally born pirate and map maker William Dampier inspired one of the best-known books in the English language. Dampier was a great navigator but an indifferent commander, disliked by his crew. On one his voyages, Alexander Selkirk preferred to be left on an island 400 miles off Chile.

He survived there alone for over four years, before being picked up by Woodes Rogers, Dampier’s partner in a two-ship expedition. Selkirk, on learning that Dampier was with Rogers, almost decided to stay on.

Selkirk’s adventures were published in 1710, and Rogers’ account in A Cruising Voyage Round the World, inspired Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner.

The novelist Thomas Hardy lived in Peter Street in 1876. He used Yeovil as a base for exploring the countryside. In his Wessex novels, he refers to the town as Ivel, a variant of the original name of the Yeo river.

A copy of Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner

An illustration and prints of Thomas Hardy

Illustrations of Daniel Defoe and Robinson Crusoe

External photograph of the building – main entrance