The navigations consist of both man-made canal cuts and adapted (dredged and straightened) parts of the River Wey.

The combined flow continues to Godalming, cuts through the chalk of the North Downs at Guildford, and passes through the Surrey Hills National Landscape to join the River Thames at Weybridge.

It included a towing path and several bridges, together with a number of sluices which enabled him to flood 150 acres (61 ha) of his land in a controlled manner, thus creating water-meadows.

As a Catholic and a royalist, his property was sequestrated during the English Civil War and he fled to the Low Countries, where he studied inland navigations and the working of pound locks.

Guildford Corporation had petitioned Parliament in 1621 and 1624 for a scheme using flash locks, but there is no evidence that the proposals had been properly surveyed or costed, and nothing came of them.

2. c. 25), was obtained in April 1671, in an attempt to resolve matters, which placed the river under the control of six trustees, with a board to pronounce on disputes.

It took another six years to work out, by which time maintenance arrears caused by neglect and wilful damage required several thousand pounds to be spent to put things right.

[9] Daniel Defoe, in A tour through England and Wales, noted very great quantities of timber using the river, which was brought to Guildford from forests in Sussex and Hampshire up to 30 miles (48 km) away during the summer months.

W. Gilpin, writing in 1776, recorded that timber was floated down the river, with each load steered by a man with a pole.

Additional tolls were raised from traffic using the first 3 miles (4.8 km) of the navigation to reach the Basingstoke Canal after that opened in 1794.

Fear of the French during the Napoleonic Wars meant that trade between London and the south and west was not sent by sea, and again the navigation benefitted.

Its opening coincided with the end of the war with France, after which coastal trade resumed, and the new canal never met the expectations of its promoters.

[12] After 1677, the shares in the Wey Navigation were split into two moieties, owned initially by Dickenson and by Tindall and Cressey jointly.

Winifred Hodges, who was Dickinson's heir, then managed to obtain joint control, and her shares were sold to Lord Portmore in 1723.

The Portmores and Langtons continued to manage the navigation into the nineteenth century, but the death of one shareholder had often resulted in those shares being distributed among several heirs.

On his death two years later, William Stevens III became the manager of both navigations, but sought to ensure ownership by buying up most of the Langton shares.

The connection via the Thames to the London Docks and the number of corn mills on the river were also factors, as was a steady increase in leisure traffic,[14] which had generated income of £371 as early as 1893.

[15] Harry Stevens took over the running of the navigations in 1930, at a time when industries were beginning to close, or transfer traffic to the roads, and when a major restructuring of the Wey valley was just starting, to improve flood relief.

This involved building new weirs and relief channels, including the Broad Mead Cut, which ran between Cartbridge and Papercourt.

By the 1940s the Godalming Navigation was virtually derelict, and trade declined when Newark Mill closed during the Second World War.

When traffic from Coxes Mill ceased in the 1960s, the navigation was no longer viable, and Stevens gave it to the National Trust in 1964.

The Commissioners of the Godalming Navigation gave their rights to Guildford Corporation in 1968, who passed it on to the National Trust, and for the first time, both parts of the river were under common ownership.

Reliance was built in 1931–1932, and was for many years abandoned on mud flats at Leigh-on-Sea after sinking when it hit Cannon Street Railway Bridge in London in 1968.

[21] Metal piling was erected around the weir to allow work to proceed and the emptied stretch of the river refilled to restore the navigation.

The line for building materials, agricultural goods, wood and coal was in direct competition with that canal and accelerated its demise.

However, the railway closed in 1965, as a result of the Beeching Axe, and the bridge across the combined river and canal was demolished soon after, leaving just the supporting abutments.

Opened on 7 July 2006, the Unstead Woods Downslink Bridge is a single-span metal structure provided a cycle and pedestrian connection across the river.