Sompting is a village and

civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of Parish (administrative division), administrative parish used for Local government in England, local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government below district ...

in the coastal Adur District of

West Sussex West Sussex is a county in South East England on the English Channel coast. The ceremonial county comprises the shire districts of Adur, Arun, Chichester, Horsham, and Mid Sussex, and the boroughs of Crawley and Worthing. Covering an a ...

, England between Lancing and

Worthing Worthing () is a seaside town in West Sussex, England, at the foot of the South Downs, west of Brighton, and east of Chichester. With a population of 111,400 and an area of , the borough is the second largest component of the Brighton and H ...

. It is half grassland slopes and half developed plain at the foot of the South Downs National Park. Twentieth-century estates dovetail into those of slightly larger Lancing.

Etymology

The village's name comes from the Old English ''*sumpt'' + ''-ingas'', meaning "(settlement of) the dwellers at the marsh". Its earliest recorded form is ''Suntinga'', in a document of 956, but

Domesday Book Domesday Book () – the Middle English spelling of "Doomsday Book" – is a manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 by order of King William I, known as William the Conqueror. The manusc ...

(1086) renders the name as ''Sultinges'', its Norman-speaking clerks being unfamiliar with the consonant-cluster ''-mpt''. As the toponymist Adrian Room noted, there is no obviously marshy land there nowadays, but it is low-lying and near the sea.

Landmarks and major buildings

The Church of St Mary the Blessed Virgin is a Grade I-listed

Anglo-Saxon The Anglo-Saxons were a Cultural identity, cultural group who inhabited England in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their origins to settlers who came to Britain from mainland Europe in the 5th century. However, the ethnogenesis of the Anglo- ...

and Norman church, separated from the centre of the village since 1939 by th