Pallingham Lock marked the point where the River Arun linked to the Wey and Arun Canal, which provided an inland route to London

No postcards of Pallingham Lock have yet been found, although an oid photograph is used in several of P.A.L. Vine’s books on local waterways. The earliest (labelled 1940-50) is from a series of lantern slides of the Arun and its valley, originally prepared and hand coloured in the late 1940s by a G.M. Thompson of Littlehampton.  

The other view is a colour photograph by Eric Holden, taken around 1959, provided by his daughter Pamela Platt. 

Although both images show the old lock clearly visible from the Arun, this has not been the case for many years. However, when filming The Lost Wey to the Sea in 2002, we did manage to enter it from the top of the lock.

There are some toll records for the lock in the WSCC Records Office, and these show passage by barges owned by members of the Doick family, including W. Doick with No.90 in January 1842 and J. Doick with No.36 in November 1868. 

Northwards from here, traffic would have used the Arun Navigation, and from Newbridge onwards the Wey & Arun Canal, which featured in our 2002 documentary. 

Our 2002 documentary The Lost Wey to the Sea includes a sequence downstream from Pallingham Lock to Stopham Bridge.

The words used by Jarrett Bacon Dashwood on the soundtrack (taken from his 1868 book From the Thames to the Solent) seem just as relevant to the surroundings now as they did then.

This part of the filming was squeezed between a rain storm and approaching darkness, so it was something of a challenge to complete. 

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