Place:Climping, Sussex, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Climping (also spelt Clymping) is a village and coastal civil parish containing agricultural and natural sandy land in the Arun District of West Sussex, England. The parish also contains the hamlet of Atherington, located on the English Channel. Climping Village is three miles (5 km) west of Littlehampton, just north of the A259 road. The parish covers an area of 6.35 km2 (2.45 sq mi) and had a population of 771 in the UK census of 2011.

The parish church, dedicated to St Mary, dates from 1080, and is teamed with those of Yapton and Ford under one vicar. There is a canonical sundial, dating from the 12th century, on the south wall.

A windmill here predates the mid-18th century and survives, unused for wind power, bereft of its sails, but kept up and lived in.

The following description from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72 is provided by the website A Vision of Britain Through Time (University of Portsmouth Department of Geography).

"CLIMPING, a parish in Worthing [registration] district, Sussex; at the mouth of the river Arun and on the South Coast railway, 1 mile WSW of Arundel and Littlehampton [railway] station, and 4 SSW of Arundel. It has a post office under Arundel. Acres:, 2,185; of which 380 are water. Real property: £3,736. Population: 331. Houses: 50. The property is subdivided.

"Lands here were held, under Roger de Montgomery, by the Norman abbey of Almenesches and St. Martin at Seez. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Chichester. Value: £304. Patron: the Lord Chancellor. The church is early English, with circular windows above lancets; and has a Norman tower."

Research Tips

• The West Sussex Record Office is located in Chichester. Because it holds the records of the Church of England Diocese of Chichester, which covers the whole of Sussex, it has church records relating to both parts of Sussex.
• An on-line catalogue for some of the collections held by the West Sussex Record Office is available under the Access to Archives (A2A) project (a nationwide facility housed at The National Archives, Kew).
• West Sussex Past - database of 2 million records from West Sussex heritage organizations.
• The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies' Sussex Collection (PDF). This is a 9-page PDF naming the files relating to Sussex in their collection-a possible first step in a course of research.
• The National Library of Scotland has a website which provides maps taken from the Ordnance Survey England & Wales One-Inch to the Mile series of 1892-1908 as well as equivalent maps for Scotland itself. The immediate presentation is a "help" screen and a place selection screen prompting the entry of a location down to town, village or parish level. These screens can be removed by a click of the "X". The map is very clear and shows parish and county boundaries and many large buildings and estates that existed at the turn of the 20th century. Magnification can be adjusted and an "overlay feature" allows inspection of the area today along with that of 1900. The specific map from the series can be viewed as a whole ("View this map") and this allows the inspection of the map legend (found in the left hand bottom corner. Becoming familiar with the various facilities of these maps is well worth the trouble.

• GENUKI on Climping
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex: Volume 5, Part 1, Arundel Rape: South-Western Part, Including Arundel, section on Climping
• Maps of the local area are to be found on pages for Avisford Hundred, Arundel Rape and East Preston Rural District.