The priest of a Catholic church in Hampshire has laughed off a disturbing incident, where a severed deer head was left outside his church in what some considered to be an act of witchcraft.

“If they really want to impress me, leave a couple of venison sausages,” joked Canon Simon Treloar, of St Theresa of the Child Jesus Church in Totton, Hampshire.

He told BBC South: “I just laughed… I don’t see it as anything sinister or occult. My faith’s a little bigger than that.”

The strange incident follows one a month earlier, where a severed deer’s head and inverted cross were left outside a church in Lyndhurst, less than five miles away.

In July, another deer’s head was left atop a gravestone less that eight miles away in Burley.