High summer is when the rest of the country winds down, increasingly falling in with the southern European model of a long lazy August, even if we do not have quite the weather to justify it. But here in Walsingham, north Norfolk, we have just experienced the busiest time of the year, with the Feast of the Assumption drawing the annual procession of pilgrims to this ancient Marian shrine.For over a decade, we have been based as a family each summer down one of the long, narrow, windy lanes that spread out around Walsingham, into villages that were themselves once swept up in the early twentieth-century revival of this famous medieval shrine, destroyed by the Reformation.Today, though, that tide has long since ebbed. And Walsingham is once more retreating in on itself. If it is busy in Aug