Priory Bay is a small privately owned bay on the northeast coast of the

Isle of Wight The Isle of Wight ( ) is a Counties of England, county in the English Channel, off the coast of Hampshire, from which it is separated by the Solent. It is the List of islands of England#Largest islands, largest and List of islands of England#Mo ...

, England. It lies to the east of

Nettlestone Nettlestone is a village on the Isle of Wight, England about south east from Ryde. It is listed in the Domesday Book and was established c.1086. Together with Seaview, it forms the civil parish of Nettlestone and Seaview. The Priory Bay Hotel ...

village and another mile along the coast from Seaview. It stretches from Horestone Point in the north to Nodes Point in the south, the bay is surrounded by woodland known as Priory Woods owned by the

National Trust The National Trust, formally the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, is a charity and membership organisation for heritage conservation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In Scotland, there is a separate and ...

. The bay faces east towards

Selsey Bill Selsey Bill is a headland into the English Channel on the south coast of England in the county of West Sussex. The southernmost town in Sussex is Selsey which is at the end of the Manhood Peninsula and ''Selsey Bill'' is situated on the town's so ...

and has a shoreline and can be accessed by walking round Horestone Point from Seagrove Bay.

Geography

The northern part of the bay has a straight coastline that makes a beach that is sandy with some pebbles. At the southern end the bay curves round to the east. Here the coast is rocky with evidence of walls and

buttress A buttress is an architectural structure built against or projecting from a wall which serves to support or reinforce the wall. Buttresses are fairly common on more ancient buildings, as a means of providing support to act against the lateral ( ...

es that were built to protect the coastline. These have largely been breached and lie scattered along the shore. The cliffs around the bay rise to around but are under 'active

erosion Erosion is the action of surface processes (such as water flow or wind) that removes soil, rock, or dissolved material from one location on the Earth's crust, and then transports it to another location where it is deposited. Erosion is dis ...

' from the sea, particularly affecting the southern part of the bay. The seabed is predominantly sandy and the shallow bay shelves gradually to the shore, a shallow sandbank called ''Gull Bank'' exists just offshore which keeps a long thin pool of water next to the beach at low tide.

History

Palaeolithic The Paleolithic or Palaeolithic (), also called the Old Stone Age (from Greek: παλαιός ''palaios'', "old" and λίθος '' lithos'', "stone"), is a period in human prehistory that is distinguished by the original development of stone to ...

tools, from the early Stone Age, have been discovered in the gravels on the beach of the bay, these tools have been washed down off the cliffs. Several hundred of these

flint Flint, occasionally flintstone, is a sedimentary cryptocrystalline form of the mineral quartz, categorized as the variety of chert that occurs in chalk or marly limestone. Flint was widely used historically to make stone tools and sta ...

implements have been found on the bay since they were first discovered in 1886. The bay takes its name from a small

priory A priory is a monastery of men or women under religious vows that is headed by a prior or prioress. Priories may be houses of mendicant friars or nuns (such as the Dominicans, Augustinians, Franciscans, and Carmelites), or monasteries of ...

located nearby thought to be connected to monks from St Helens Old Church. To the south of the bay is the Nodes Point Battery, which was used from the around the start of the 20th Century till 1956.

References

{{Bays on the Isle of Wight Bays of the Isle of Wight