St Mary’s Church is one of the finest and most complete churches in England to have survived from before the Norman Conquest – and one of the finest in Europe north of the Alps. The minster church and its religious community was already here in 804, only a decade after the first Viking raids on England.

Deerhurst has a special place in Anglo-Saxon England, for it is here that Kings Edmund Ironside and Cnut met to agree on the partition of England in 1016, bringing an end to decades of warfare.

A little to the south of the churchyard is Odda’s Chapel, now in the care of English Heritage, which was consecrated in 1056. The church and the medieval priory site that it adjoins is set in an ancient landscape alongside the River Severn, with evidence of its occupation in the Roman and prehistoric periods.