Sompting is a village and civil parish in the coastal Adur District of West Sussex, England between Lancing and Worthing.
[3] Its earliest recorded form is Suntinga, in a document of 956, but Domesday Book (1086) renders the name as Sultinges, its Norman-speaking clerks being unfamiliar with the consonant-cluster -mpt.
[5] The church was originally built by the Saxons c.960 AD, then was adapted by the Normans when William de Braose, 1st Lord of Bramber granted it to the Knights Templar in the 12th century.
Queen Caroline, consort of King George IV stayed at Sompting Abbotts in 1814 on her way across the English Channel to the Continent.
During the First World War a prisoner-of-war camp was built on the Rectory Farm estate, on the west side of Busticle Lane.
[8] A house which belonged to Edward Trelawny, adventurer, author and friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley, is also in the village.
Sompting also historically extended west to the ancient droveway today known as Charmandean Lane, but in 1933 this land was given to the neighbouring borough of Worthing.
The highest point in the civil parish is Steep Down at 149 metres (489 ft) above Ordnance Datum (sea level).