The Great Stour cuts through the North Downs at Wye, between Ashford and Canterbury. Cardinal John Kempe founded Wye College here in 1447 as a college of priests, and its medieval buildings, cloister included, are a rare complete survival. From 1894 it was an agricultural college, and in 1902 its students cut the Wye Crown into the chalk above the village for Edward VII’s coronation; the college closed in 2009. The North Downs Way passes through, and up on the scarp Wye National Nature Reserve has the Devil’s Kneading Trough, a steep dry valley shaped by frost after the last ice age, with views across Romney Marsh. More than 20 kinds of orchid have been recorded on its chalk grassland.
