St Mary’s, a former priory church, is situated in the southern part of Hayling Island, to the E of Portsmouth. The modern settlement of South Hayling lies to the south of the church. While Church Road is now lined by ribbon development, the location would have been rural when the church was first established, in the mid-13thc.

The church is built of uncoursed rubble with ashlar dressings. The roofs of the nave, aisles and chancel are covered in red tiles. A sturdy central tower with a shingled broach spire rises over the E bay of the nave. An octagonal glass-sided meeting room (The Lantern) has been erected in the churchyard on the N side of the nave.

Inside, the four-bay chancel terminates in an elegant five-lancet window. There is a small vestry on its N side. The piers of the tower bay feature highly skilled carvings, including base spurs decorated with a variety of heads and animals, and inventive stiff-leaf capitals. The tower bay is flanked by chapels marking the E ends of the nave aisles.

The three-bay nave arcades are composed of wide pointed arches, of two chamfered orders, carried by octagonal piers. The oculi of the clerestorey are positioned – rather unusually – in the spandrels over the piers. Above this is an original kingpost roof.

There are entrances to N, W and S, the main one being through a timber S porch on the S side. The N doorway has been reused to access The Lantern.

The font, located in the nave, pre-dates the church.

In 1066 Hayling Island was granted to the Abbey of Jumièges in Normandy. The Abbey established a daughter house, the Priory of All Saints, in the southern part of Hayling Island, but by 1200 the church and monastic buildings were threatened by inundation. All Saints was eventually overcome by the waves in the 14thc.

Since All Saints was under threat, around 1250 it was decided to build a new church and priory inland. This was St Mary’s. The priory buildings have not survived; indeed, their exact location is uncertain. Nevertheless, the church remains largely intact. The E end was begun around 1250, and the nave added in the third quarter of the 13thc. The timber S porch was added c.1400.

When alien abbeys lost their lands in 1415, St Mary’s passed to Sheen Charterhouse, near Richmond in Surrey. After the Dissolution the church was granted to the Earl of Arundel.

The nave and aisles were restored and reseated by G. E. Street in 1868. This work included a new W window. At that time the font was located at the W end of the N aisle. In 1892-93 A. W. Blomfield undertook the restoration of the chancel, erected a new vestry, and replaced the crumbling Purbeck nave piers in granite. In the mid-1960s the plaster was stripped from the walls. The Lantern was built in 2018-19.

The font was probably brought to St Mary’s from All Saints in the mid-13thc. (see History), and enriched by the addition of limestone elements. These are comparable in style to the carvings in the tower bay and probably date from c.1250. The contrast in the style of the heads, one demonic and the other beatific, is doubtless deliberate.

The arcaded Purbeck marble bowl is of a type widespread in Hampshire and Sussex through the late 12thc. and early 13thc.

An Anglo-Saxon cross base, now located at the E end of the S aisle, has been recorded by the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Sculpture.