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The sea laps somewhat tunelessly, grating the pebbles, with a deeper bass note coming from a sea cave round the headland. Echoes never quite sound the same twice. Lethra beach is mostly grey pebble and dried seaweed-like woodshavings, the kind that sticks to your wet feet and dries like a second skin. The driftwood is bleached white and the inevitable plastic rubbish has been weathered by the sea.

The sky turns dark blue in the heat of the day. Halfway around the bay, a rather Pyrrhic fig tree offers a little shade. Nearby, a small circle of stones cradles the remains of a fire lit a few days, weeks or years ago. (The stone you dislodge from a ledge as you scramble down the hillside could have been first placed there 30 years ago or 3,000.)

Days run one into another, morning into afternoon. You lose track of time on islands like this — not that it no longer exists; rather that it exists in a more complicated order. The past has unfinished business. On a beach like this, the Argonauts came ashore to mend their broken oars and take on water. You are woken suddenly by their voices; sounds drift briefly from far away, and then for no good reason are inaudible from close at hand. Perhaps among the pebbles they found an inexplicable object and the sailors cast lots for it. A half-empty bottle of factor 25? A broken Walkman? A single arm of a pair of sunglasses? At the far end of the beach, an old brown Rumpelstiltskin-like nudist has built himself a shelter of driftwood. He looks as though he could have been there for centuries.

Tilos was named after the son of Helios and Allia, sister of the Telchines, the dog-headed, flipper-handed children of the sea, who belong to an older tradition of pre-Hellenic moon goddesses. He came to the island to gather herbs and was said to have built a temple dedicated to Helios Apollo and Poseidon. I have always suspected that Greek islands still feel very different depending on the gods they were sacred to in classical times. The Helios Apollo islands of the southern Dodecanese are very different from the Artemis islands further north: much gentler, less scary. Late one night many years ago, on the spur of the moment, we got off at an island we’d never heard of to find the port dark and deserted, not even the usual crowd of old women with rooms to let. We spent the night under the stars in a churchyard and early next morning walked into town to find street after street of derelict neoclassical mansions and one shop where behind the plate-glass window sinister dummies in mirrored sunglasses modelled 1950s casualwear. That would have been an Artemis island.

Tilos has had little impact on the history books. The Persian fleet sailed past in 290BC but probably didn’t stop. The poet Erinna was born here; she was once as famous as Sappho, but almost all of her work has been lost. Centuries have gone by without a single recorded event.

It never found wealth in sponges, trade or shipbuilding like its more fortunate neighbours, nor suffered their sudden decline. It lacked the long sandy beaches and the grand classical ruins of Rhodes or Kos and so missed out on the discerning tourists of the 50s and 60s and the tacky commercialism of the 70s, 80s and 90s. The islanders have remained the same through centuries of bad times and a few decades of good.

Behind the beach, the hills are deserted, a landscape of red earth, white boulders and a garrigue of small shrubs, mostly spiny, forming neat, dense hummocks: thyme, wormwood, broom, heath. (Someone once wrote that in high summer the shrubs seem to drip electricity.) The thorny twigs of euphorbia acanthothamnos grow at 120-degree angles like chicken wire or a complicated chemical model; its flowers smell of honey. The larger euphorbia dendroides has a Strewwelpeter shock of twigs and branches that look as dead as bone but support a delicate umbrella of green and rusty orange leaves. Growing between the shrubs are obscure orchids and plants with evocative names like acanthus and mandrake.

Japanese monks spend a lifetime working in their gardens to achieve this effect; here, it grows without effort, with no pruning, spraying or watering, the weeding done by the goats.

The plants that thrive are those the goats won’t eat — too thorny or too poisonous. It’s odd that they don’t eat thyme or rosemary, and it seems a little unfair that one of the island’s delicacies is roast kid with rice and the same local herbs.

You might have thought that Greek islands always looked like this, but only 50 years ago the landscape was very different.

When you first see Tilos from prow of the ferry, the hills look barren. Parallel lines run along the contours, getting fainter towards the tops, like some odd geological formation; close to, you realise that these are the remains of stone terraces. Within living memory, the valleys and hills were cultivated; the dominant colours were almond blossom in early spring, wheat in summer. The larger stone circle behind Lethra beach is not an undiscovered megalithic relic, nor a marker for helicopters, rather a pit for threshing corn.

Tilos was a fertile island overflowing with springs. (Symi and Halki with identical rainfall have no springs at all, or certainly very few.) But this was subsistence farming of the hardest kind. Every few years, the terraces would have been rebuilt, every year the land tilled and watered and the wheat cut and ground by hand. How many hours of labour went into making a single loaf of bread? No wonder so many of the islanders left as soon as they could for Australia, Germany and America, forming close Tiliot communities a long way from home.

You would be unlucky to find more than half a dozen other people on Lethra beach, and walking inland you should have an entire valley to yourself. After half an hour, you reach the main road where the traffic is sometimes as busy as one car every two minutes, too many for some. To the left, it runs down to Livardia, the new port; to the right, it leads to the capital, Megalo Chorio (population 180), and the sandy beaches of Eristos and Plaka where backpackers are still free to pitch their tents undisturbed under the trees, and the sign saying “Nuddism is forbidden” is usually ignored.

Across the island, shrines and churches are dedicated to St Michael and St George, both conquerors of monsters. Signifying what? The location of pagan sites? The purification of earth spirits?

On the hillside above Eristos, a shell from a wartime British destroyer opened the entrance of a cave that had been closed for 6,000 years. Here in 1971, a young archaeologist found the fossilised bones of dwarf elephants, the size of Shetland ponies, the first ever found in Europe. They had sheltered there from a volcano erupting in Nissiros or Santorini and were trapped by the lava. The current theory is that the elephants arrived on Tilos having swum from Africa, which seems hardly credible. Below the cave is a small stone amphitheatre dating from as far back as 1997, possibly even earlier.

At the far end of the island, surrounded by cypress trees and low clouds, the 15th-century monastery of Agios Pandeleimonas was built on the site of the original Tilos temple; on either side of the chapel are two of the original marble columns, not big — nothing on the scale of Sounion or Delphi — but the real thing nevertheless. You touch them and suddenly jump back 2,000 years. The shock of the old. The screen is carved with sea serpents; pictures show a skull and crossbones and a winged bull. On a shelf by the floor, a row of wax dolls look like plastic until you touch them.

Outside, the water from the spring is said to have fallen as rain on mainland Turkey, coming under the sea through channels in the rock. Water moves in mysterious ways.

We sat in the garden drinking ouzo and eating the island speciality of stale twice-baked bread soaked in water.

In the centre of the island, the old capital of Mikro Chorio was abandoned in the 1960s; from the main road, it looks like a Braque landscape. The town fell apart fast because the inhabitants took the wooden beams with them to build their new houses in Livardia. Now, it belongs to the goats. They look at you inquisitively as though saying, “We don’t really mind you being here, and we’d be far too polite to say so if we did, but strictly speaking you are trespassing.” They move among the ruins with almost supernatural agility. Large arums with flowers like purple velvet have colonised the floors of the houses.

The houses are very small, huddled close together; for 2,000 years, islands like this were dangerous places to live. A short walk above the town, you can see the sea in all directions and give warning of invaders and pirates. From here, you could have seen the Persian fleet, the British destroyer and the swimming elephants. You can still see the island’s new ferry on its daily journey from Rhodes, an improbable hybrid of the seas, part catamaran, part hovercraft.

On high summer nights, the village comes alive with floodlights on the ruins, a bar and a disco playing 70s rock till 2am and Greek music till dawn, disturbing no one but the goats.

I spent my last evening at Sophia’s Restaurant on the waterfront in Livardia. There was an eclipse of the moon and Sophia’s son Vasili put on a Pink Floyd tape in celebration. On a still night 20 years ago, I lay half-asleep on the wooden deck of a boat moored in a bay much like this and heard the same music drifting over the water.

In those days, I sat in tavernas like this, counting the drachmas, and thought that if ever I became a respectable member of society, one of the few benefits would be that I would be able to go back to the Aegean and eat lobster. But my income has barely kept pace with Greek inflation, and the lobster is as out of reach as ever.

On Tilos, the pleasure is still in simple things like bread and honey, olives, plain yogurt, cheap wine. (The honey is the best I’ve ever tasted. I only brought one pot home assuming it wouldn’t taste the same in England, but it did.)

Along the narrow, three-mile path round the cliffs from Lethra to the harbour, a rocky vantage point looks down over a small bay, a deserted red-sand beach, an island and the blue and white Aegean. Leaning against the rock is a small disc of English stone bearing the legend: “Ruth 1948-1998. She loved this place.” Whoever she was, she had very good taste in places.

Beside it, people had placed pebbles from the beach. I saw no one on the path, although when I returned two days later someone had left a small ouzo bottle half-filled with water and a sprig of bougainvillea.

A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Guardian.

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