Thule Shield Pannier 22L with InLock

The Thule Shield Pannier 22L is a lightweight, waterproof roll-top bag. It requires the matching £25 Thule InLock Universal Panel to fit to your bike, but once that’s installed it can be fit and removed in seconds with no faff.

The Shield Pannier is built to the quality you’d expect from Thule. The materials and fittings are tough, and I have no reason to suspect it wouldn’t last a decade or so of daily abuse.

At only 800g, this is a lightweight way to gain 22L of capacity with a 15kg weight limit. That’s down to the fact its rigidity and mounting are taken care of by the Thule InLock Universal Panel, which stays on your bike (and which we’ll have a separate review of soon). This separation of Church and State, as it were, works out well for actually carrying the thing – which given its briefcase-style top handle is what it’s designed for.

It’s basically a pannier-shaped drybag with a handle. Being IPX4-rated, it’s not immersible – but given the thickness of the material and welded seams throughout, I’d defy an actual firehose to make much headway on wetting the interior.

Either side of the handle are wee nylon webbing loops that look to fit a shoulder strap clip. Thule may have missed out listing this as a product feature on its website given it sells shoulder straps for the InLock range. It’s certainly an option by the looks of it.

The top of the bag folds over twice and buckles down either side, with those buckles then cinchable down even tighter to remove any rattles or wobbles. Most drybags roll over three times, but for a bag designed to stay upright and not end up in a river, twice will do.

You get small reflective strips front and back, and the loops that hold the cinch straps in place look perfectly sized to slot a rearward facing light into.

The fact the only hardware on the pannier is the buckles means that in use the Shield Pannier is dead quiet. The InLock system really is a good shout for faff-free, quiet and strong carriage of hefty amounts of kit.

I deliberately overloaded the bag and attacked a few robust trails. Suffice to say, nothing was heard and nothing shifted. A subsequent test then suggested I was likely to expend a few swimming pools’ worth of garden hose output without needing to update my waterproofing assessment.

£90 isn’t cheap for a pannier, for sure. Halfords’ Advanced Waterproof Pannier Bag is £30 for 20L of capacity, although we were more impressed with the Oxford Aqua V20 Single QR Pannier at £44.99 – although it’s not the lightest.

What you’re paying for here is the relatively light weight, strength, waterproofing and quality and the faff-free mounting and removal.

It is however still more expensive than Altura’s Thunderstorm City Waterproof Pannier that makes use of a Klickfix attachment with a quick release. That one lacks a carry handle though and is only rated to carry 10kg versus 15kg for the Thule.

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