Ham Street Tourist Information

The village of Hamstreet is situated where the Kentish Wealden hills meet the flatlands of Romney Marsh. There are many traditional Kentish weatherboard buildings in the village centre.

The village is something of a Mecca for ramblers, with three long distance footpaths. The Greensand Way begins at the village crossroads and runs for 110 miles to the Surrey town of Haselmere. The Saxon Shore Way and Royal Military Canal path also pass through the village. The latter follows the 28-mile length of this ancient waterway, built as an obstruction to a feared Napoleonic invasion.

Hamstreet has a lively village centre with shops, pub, Indian restaurant, railway station, school, doctor's surgery and dentist, as well as a cafe in the garden centre. Close to Hamstreet, in the parish of Warehorne are a further two pubs. The majority of the village is situated within the parish of Orlestone which has a pretty Norman church.

Nearby are Hamstreet Woods nature reserve and Orlestone Forest, part of the huge swathe of woodland that once covered the entire Weald.

The village was once featured on a set of postage stamps in map form, issued to commemorate 200 years of the Ordnance Survey, whose first publication was a map of the area nearby.

The village has been featured on Blue Peter and will soon be studied by geography students countrywide, as a case study of a changing community.

Well worth a visit is the annual country Fayre and festival of transport every June.

Description by Adam Colton