A website for the place I still call home

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I put a website live for my dad today.

That sounds smaller than it felt.

It’s for The Dusthole, officially The Kings Arms, a 15th-century coaching inn in Shepton Mallet. It sits just off the old Fosse Way, in a building that has been doing some version of hospitality for six centuries and change. The nickname comes from the flour mill opposite: workers would cross the road after a shift, still dusted white, and the name stuck.

History is funny like that. A name picked up in the muck of ordinary working life can outlast signs, landlords, paint, websites, pandemics, and a frankly heroic number of carpets.

And for about twenty-five years, one way or another, it has been home.

I arrived needing somewhere to land

The Dusthole came into my life after a relationship went… let’s say sour. The wedding was about six weeks away, which isn’t generally considered the ideal point to realise the whole thing is wrong, but there we are. I’ve no regrets. It was the right decision. It also left me standing at another crossroads, with a bag full of consequences and no particularly clever plan.

Dad offered me a place to stay.

He’d bought The Dusthole a couple of years earlier, and it was a chance for a clean start. So I drove the hundred and seventy-five miles south, landed on his doorstep in the evening, and found the place lit up, warm, and full of customers merrily chatting away inside.

I fell in love with it immediately.

Not because it was polished. It wasn’t. The place was rougher around the edges then, and it hadn’t had the care it deserved for a while before Dad took it on. But you could see the potential. More than that, you could feel the weight of it. The history in the walls. The importance it already held for him. And, quite quickly, the importance it was going to hold for me too.

That’s the bit a website struggles to explain. You can say “historic coaching inn” and people understand the category. You can show beams, fireplaces, guest rooms, a bar, a courtyard. You can write the copy as warmly as you like. But the feeling of arriving somewhere at exactly the point you need somewhere to be… that’s harder to put in a hero banner.

Dad gave me rope, then helped with the knot

I lived with Dad for nearly five years.

Not always calmly, obviously. I was still a hot-headed kid in a lot of ways, and we didn’t always see eye to eye. I had opinions. He had experience. I had the sort of confidence only a young man with limited evidence can maintain. He was patient… mostly.

More importantly, he let me figure things out without being preachy or condescending about it. You can read that as: he gave me enough rope to hang myself, then helped me down from the gallows before I managed to put the noose round my neck.

More than once.

All the while, The Dusthole was the constant. I’ve slept in literally every room in that building, including the main bar after falling asleep in front of the fire on a winter evening. I know the crooked beams, the odd corners, the cracked panes, the bricks that feel like they have been there longer than most countries. The building isn’t sentimental about you. It creaks, leaks, leans, and demands attention. But it’s there.

That mattered then.

It still does.

Over time Dad, my brother and I grew the pub empire from one to a grand total of six, with various degrees of success. Some lasted longer than others. Some made more sense than others. If you have ever watched a family decide that one pub is not quite enough chaos and perhaps six would be a better number, you will understand that wisdom is not always distributed evenly through the room.

But The Dusthole stayed the anchor. The linchpin. Everything else came and went, and eventually it all reconsolidated there.

He is the place

Dad has always had presence, but in The Dusthole it’s something else entirely. He isn’t just the owner of the building. He’s woven into it.

He’s run the place for twenty-six or twenty-seven years now, depending on which date you count from, and done vast stretches of that almost single-handedly. Even in his seventies he can still be behind the bar, in the kitchen, taking a booking, sorting a room, talking to a guest, fixing some odd little building problem that would make a contractor suck air through their teeth and invent a large number.

He takes pride in the reputation he built, and rightly so. People still ask him about the Sunday carvery, which is absurd because he hasn’t put one on for about fifteen years. That’s either very good cooking or a local memory with exceptional battery life. Probably both.

When people talk about family businesses, they often make it sound quaint. A nice little phrase for a nice little brochure. But a place like this runs on one person’s stubbornness, taste, labour, judgement, exhaustion, charm, and ability to keep going when any sensible person would sit down and have a serious word with themselves.

That’s why the website had to feel like him, at least a bit.

Not flashy. Not pretending to be a chain hotel. Not burying the phone number behind a booking engine because some template decided conversion metrics matter more than the way the business actually works. If you want a room, you ring the inn, speak to Tony, and sort it out with a human being.

That’s not a missing feature.

That’s The Dusthole being The Dusthole.

The knock it took

COVID hit The Dusthole hard, as it hit everyone in hospitality hard. The restrictions meant Dad couldn’t open for business in the normal way, so he found another way to keep the place alive. He worked with the local council to provide stable accommodation for homeless people during the pandemic.

It did two things at once. It kept the building breathing, and it gave people somewhere stable at a time when stability was in short supply.

After the worst of the pandemic, the arrangement became more formal through an association, and for the better part of two years Dad was less hotelier and landlord, more caretaker and night warden for a wide mix of residents. In some ways it was a blessing. It gave him a break from the normal grind, especially after a few health issues, and it kept the doors from being closed entirely.

It was also a properly altruistic thing to do.

And it left the place in a bit of a state.

That’s not a complaint about the people who needed it. It’s just the reality of turning a small, old hospitality business into something else for a couple of years, then trying to turn it back again. Old buildings don’t bounce. They sulk. They collect damage, dust, damp, paperwork, and all the little unfinished jobs that hide behind the big moral decision you made because it was the right thing to do.

Since getting the place back, Dad has been working to make it serviceable again. Warm again. Inviting again. As much as a building of that age can be persuaded to behave, which is to say only when it feels like it and never in the order you would prefer.

That’s where the website comes in.

The site is a front door, not a machine

The old web presence had flagged. I had thrown together a small holding site to park the domain through COVID and after, and there had been a hotel-management SaaS in the mix at one point, but none of it really did the place justice.

The Dusthole is ready to open its doors properly again, mainly as a hotel rather than the pub it used to be, and after years of not quite operating as either… it needed a real website.

So I built one.

Hugo, GitLab Pages, a bespoke theme, responsive images, self-hosted fonts, a small amount of JavaScript, and a lot of restraint. The photographs are Hailey’s, which means the place is shown by someone who understands how to make a room feel warm without turning it into a fantasy. That matters. People book on these images. They need to look good, but they need to be truthful too.

The technically interesting version can wait for another day. The human version is this: I built a digital front door for a place that has been my family home, my safety net, and one of the constants of my adult life.

I moved on from hospitality years ago. I got tired of the industry and went off to do other reckless things, because apparently I’m nothing if not consistent. But I always knew The Dusthole was there. I don’t need that safety net in the same way any more, but knowing it exists is still comforting. Every time I go back, it feels like a homecoming.

So the site does a simple job. It shows the rooms. It tells the story. It makes the phone number easy to find. It lets people see enough of the place to decide to ring Dad.

Then it gets out of the way.

The bit I know how to give

I’ve always built things. Lego, forts, treehouses, bits of DIY, kitchen work, pub repairs, code, tools, websites, vans, whatever was in front of me and needed turning into something useful. Sometimes that has been work. Sometimes it has been escape. Sometimes it has been the only language I had for care.

This one sits firmly in that last bucket.

I can’t give Dad another twenty years of energy. I can’t undo COVID. I can’t make a centuries-old building cheaper to maintain, or hospitality less brutal, or time a little less interested in taking chunks out of all of us.

What I can do is make the website stop looking like the place was left behind. I can make it load quickly, look warm, tell the story, show Hailey’s photographs, and point people at the phone number.

That’s not everything.

It isn’t nothing either.

I hope, despite his advancing years, that Dad has many more years there. I hope he gets to keep being the heart of the place for as long as he wants to be. And when the building eventually passes to another member of the family, if that is what happens, I expect I will still be there in some form, fiddling with the website, fixing some odd little thing, and trying to keep it feeling like home.

Six centuries and change of innkeeping, a 76-year-old man still answering the phone, and a small site whose whole job is to get out of the way and point people at his door.

That’s a thing I know how to give.