‘Islanders leave things where they fall’

In an extract from her new book, Jennifer Barclay reveals how forgotten buildings and objects are being reclaimed by nature on the Greek island of Tilos

I’ve always liked scrabbling around in old stones. I was about eight years old when director John Schlesinger came to shoot part of the Second World War film Yanks, starring Richard Gere and Vanessa Redgrave, in our village. Schoolchildren were invited to audition as extras and I dutifully joined the queue but returned home filthy at the end of the day, my mother livid as I’d been missing for hours. Instead of waiting, I’d gone to a local quarry with a friend to hunt in the earth for interesting bits of broken pottery.

Thanks to family holidays in Greece and an enthusiastic teacher of Ancient Greek at grammar school, my love of old artefacts grew. While studying English literature and language at university, I opted for courses on archaeology and Old English, sifting through fragments of ancient texts. When, aged 21, I moved to Athens for a year, I spent Sundays at museums or wandering around islands. Pinned to my bedroom walls were postcards of ancient art and photos of sculptures torn from the museum guides. It gave

Tilos, down a lovely rough track in the dry riverbed, the turn-off was marked (and still is) by a rusted and long-stationary cement mixer. Up the track, below aromatic Mediterranean pines that make a soothing sound in the wind, are the remains of a café-bar, the benches and tables all given up to the elements, as if the owner always thought about opening again but never did.

Under a tree in Livadia, a boxy black Mercedes is given up for dead and mys

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Meanwhile, plastic rubbish from the dump blows across a hillside; unwanted fridges and truck tyres litter an old way through a riverbed.

A derelict reservoir lined with a black synthetic material, faulty from the start, mars a valley of farms and olive groves, a waste not only of the money spent but of the land seconded to build it. In the north of the island the water is drinkable year-round, but the summer influx of people in Livadia drains the supply and makes it salty, and most people buy plastic bottles – even in winter. Recycling systems are only just filtering through to the smaller islands.

Winter storms and currents wash things ashore: tar from ships, plastic bottles and bottle caps and “disposable” coffee cups, all sorts of shoes; plastic sheeting, broken plastic buckets and crates, plastic containers often printed with Turkish lettering. The island designates clean-up days on the main beaches before the start of the summer, so most visitors don’t see it.

Yet the things left behind from 2,000 years ago, 200 years ago, even 50 years ago, are often precious, beautiful; they do no harm and exist in harmony with the wild. These artefacts have grace, the simplicity of painstakingly worked stone and wood held together with earth, or shards of terracotta pottery.

One overcast winter day, I find myself on an unfamiliar uphill track in the north of the island which promises great things but degenerates into a barely perceptible path overgrown with phrygana, the spiny shrub that thrives in craggy limestone ground, adapted to drought, wind and grazing. I’m not really enjoying it but then I spot some ruined buildings and an old chapel.

Crouching under the heavy rock lintel – the doorway now half sunk under rubble – I tiptoe over a carpet of goat dung.

The walls seem bare but when I look closely into an arched recess, I make out very faint colours of frescoes, the top of a saint’s head with a tiny forelock of hair, probably painted several hundred years ago. The fallen, simple altar is made from a column and a slab of marble, a couple of thousand years old. The whole thing will one day crumble into the hillside.

When I emerge, the pale grey day is dappled with sunshine and the green grass liberally dotted with purple, lilac, pink and white anemones. By the time we make it down to the shore at Ayios Antonis, the sun is winning over the clouds.

I see a head above water, someone swimming – no, it’s a seal. Usually they keep to themselves, unseen in caves and on remote beaches, but they love to find a fisherman’s net full of food. It flips, showing its tail, and dives down; surfaces, flips and dives down again as it heads out to sea.