He was a cantankerous old so-and-so, but Arthur White Officer was much loved and appreciated by the parish he served for more than half a century

The Rev Arthur White Officer had no telephone, no television and no truck with the church authorities. Since he also religiously refused to acknowledge their correspondence, it fell annually to the diocesan secretary to climb into the ecclesiastical Morris Minor, drive to the top of the dale and check that he were alive and sticking.

Usually he was. For 53 years, Arthur Officer never went anywhere.

He'd become vicar of Rookhope, a former lead mining village well hidden in Weardale, in 1919. In 1955, when he was 74 and the regular congregation 70 fewer, he wrote a private pastoral letter to the faithful expressing his concern and explaining why he didn't contribute to the parish magazine.

"It wouldn't be printable," he wrote. "The least said, the better."

Eventually, he supposed, they'd amalgamate the parishes of Rookhope and Eastgate - three miles down dale - and move the priest to Eastgate, which at least had the advantage of a more commodious vicarage.

Rookhope vicarage, where he lived alone or with his faithful housekeeper Mary Brown, only had ten rooms.

"The time will come when I will have to leave," added the 1955 letter, though most knew that the only way Arthur Officer would leave Rookhope would be in an ambulance, or in a coffin.

He died in 1972, aged 91 - almost blind but still taking services until his last illness, still preserved by God and good drivers when walking down the middle of the road with his white stick, still visiting valiantly but sometimes (it's recalled) locked out.

In more than half a century of service, he had had just three days off sick.

"He was a saint," the Rev Philip Greenhalgh, now priest-in-charge of all of upper Weardale, tells a service last weekend to mark a centenary flower festival at the little parish church of St John the Evangelist, on a hill above Stotfold Burn.

A smaller church, dedicated to the Holy Trinity, had stood at the other end of the village but lost the battle against the elements. Stone was carried from one end of Rookhope to the other - "it may seem a crazy thing to have done but so much in the service of God can seem crazy," says Mr Greenhalgh.

The village raised £100 for the replacement, the Freemasons the remainder. The stone was laid by Lord Barnard, Right Worshipful Master of the Province of Durham, the Bishop of Richmond out of his patch but also in attendance.

Everything went off well, the 1904 parish magazine reported. Parishioners had made the place look quite festive and the women provided a good ham tea in the Barrington School.

Mr Officer had nonetheless objected to plans for a five yearly structural survey on the grounds that the Church Commissioners built it badly in the first place.

Last Sunday it looked simply splendid, and was well filled. Just ten congregate normally, both Anglicans and Methodists after a local partnership agreement in 1999.

"When I came to Weardale, one of the reasons I didn't tell the bishop is that I don't like crowds," says Mr Greenhalgh. "We don't usually get a crowd here."

A hitherto grey day has turned out nicely by 6pm and so has the village itself, £5,000 raised for Rookhope in Bloom and now flooded with flowers. A paraffin heater stands outside the church, as if symbolically redundant on so agreeable an August evening.

We sing Immortal Invisible and The Church's One Creation, hear a poem by R S Thomas, sing evensong from the 1662 prayer book, used by John Wesley every day of his life.

"Some might say that I look like I've stepped out of the 17th century, too," concedes the hirsute Mr Greenhalgh, almost Wesleyan himself in preaching bands and cassock.

There's also a village history exhibition, Universal Scrapbooks and tennis club minutes, memories of Stanhope and Weardale Co-op and of Rookhope's first step to heaven graveyard, of long years lead mining and of the ghost of the little brown man said to haunt the Rookhope Inn.

Like Caspar, he is a friendly ghost.

Most intriguing of all is the programme for Weardale Warship Week in 1942, when the dale was invited to find £62,000 to build the trawler minesweeper HMS Kingston.

The programme cost threepence. It would be wonderful to know if they ever raised the other £61,999 19s 9d.

Afterwards, one of those eternal village occasions that it is high privilege simply to observe, they cut a cake, admire the flowers, recall again the man who served St John's for more than half of its existence.

There was the time that a stray walker turned up at one of his solitary weekday services and the vicar, who didn't like crowds either, was reputedly not best pleased.

There was talk of his strawberry patch, shilling-a-basket, of his sweets for the bairns and pound of tea for new babies, how he'd walk the 12 round miles to visit the hospital in Stanhope, how he fell in the dyke and had to be fished out by the faithful, how cantankerousness ill concealed kind heart and how the village school closed for the afternoon so that all could attend his funeral.

Janet Hogarth, once among great tribes of Rookhope Hogarths, recalls that after Sunday School - Officer class, as it were - he'd give all the children breakfast. "We had the run of the vicarage except for upstairs; he'd never let us upstairs."

"He had his moments, mind," says Jean Roddam, "but he was a grand old fellow at the bottom of him."

The church survives because of donations from villagers who rarely attend. Philip Greenhalgh expresses the hope that, up there in the hills, they can become even closer to God.

Whatever the future holds, it's agreed, they owe a big debt to Arthur White Officer.

* Special evensong services to mark the centenary of Rookhope parish church will be held at 6pm every Sunday this month. The Bishop of Durham leads a centenary harvest festival at 6pm on the last Sunday of September.