Colin Stephenson, who succeeded Alfred Hope Patten as Master of the Guardians and Priest Administrator of the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, was one of the most amusing and entertaining observers of the high Anglicanism to which he was devoted. In Walsingham Way, he gives full flight to his renowned wit and self-deprecating humour. He tells the remarkable story of the restoration of the mediaeval Shrine by his famous predecessor and paints a vivid portrait of this larger than life character whose determined vision recreated England's premier place of pilgrimage and renewal in the quiet Norfolk countryside. We meet in these pages an endless succession of fascinating characters who flocked to Walsingham in those heady years of the first half of the twentieth century. Colin Stephenson never set out to write an authoritative historical record and his perspective is at times distinctively personal, yet Watchigham Way remains one of the most warm, engaging and sought after accounts of one of Anglo-Catholicism's greatest triumphs and one of its most memorable characters.

Widely regarded as one of the most amusing ecclesiastical memoirs of the 20th century, Colin Stephenson's autobiography is an Anglo-Catholic classic, embodying a great love for people and a relish for their eccentricities and foibles. The heady peaks of Tractarian glories between the wars decidedly shaped Colin Stephenson's preferences. Young and impressionable, he revelled in the rich ceremonial of continental Catholicism in all its triumphal self-assurance. As an inexperienced naval chaplain in the Second World War, he set about installing baroque altars on warships, despite the 'violent firmness' with which certain admirals and captains reacted. Such encounters delighted him and many episodes are stories told against himself. After the war, and despite serious injury, he returned to Oxford and created the 'highest church in the city', before succeeding Alfred Hope Patten as Guardian of the Shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham, where he found plenty to satisfy his appetite for the oddities of high Anglicanism. 'It may be a trivial record', he writes, 'but I hope it is illuminated by love and I think I have made myself as ridiculous as anyone.'