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People don’t like high fliers who come unstuck. “Got above himself,” they say. Few see Icarus as a romantic hero, a rebel against the conformity of the middle way; or, like Yeats’s Irish airman, driven by a lonely impulse of delight to his tumult in the clouds.

Like most Greek myths, the story of Daedalus and Icarus is slightly disturbing, as though there is a darker and very different truth just out of reach — the implausibilities and inconsistencies somehow add authenticity; made-up stories don’t usually have so many loose ends — and it has been potent enough to interest poets and artists for the best part of 2,500 years.

In Herbert Draper’s late-Victorian painting in the Tate Britain, he is a drowned Shelley surrounded by water nymphs like North Oxford bluestockings but with fewer clothes. But most artists are more critical. The 16th-century Dutch engraver Hendrik Goltzius saw him as a fallen angel like Lucifer, a serious transgressor against the laws of the gods. In the Breughel painting in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels, his fate is almost as bad — he has become yesterday’s news even before he hits the water, like an evicted Big Brother contestant, almost an incidental detail in the painting. “The ploughman may/ Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry/ But for him it was not an important failure,” wrote WH Auden. “And the expensive delicate ship that must have seen/ Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky/ had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on”.

You should ignore suggestions that there is no real connection between the myth and the island of Icaria, or at least until you get home — Icarus is the local hero; the islanders are very possessive about him. And Daedalus and Icarus could easily have come this way, following the roundabout route of early sailors who stayed close to land, proceeding in a series of short hops from Crete to Karpathos, the Dodecanese, Icaria and the Cyclades.

Early sailors would have been heading for Nas on the north west coast of Icaria, the last safe haven before Delos. This was always a dangerous stretch of water and Homer used it is a metaphor for wildness, “the crowd surging to and fro like the waves of the Icarian sea”.

Nas flourished for 500 years, then when ships became larger and sailors more confident it became redundant. When piracy made the Aegean inhospitable, the islanders retreated to the hills for over a thousand years, living in houses hidden away in the forest and speaking a dialect closer to classical Greek than any found elsewhere. Nas was abandoned until the 20th-century when the small beach and green valley made it a suitable spot for tourism.

The beach is protected on either side by ancient granite rocks, wrinkled like elephant hide. It’s the kind of bay where Andromeda nearly came to a bad end. It looks like a film set of mythological Greece, with a Ray Harryhausen monster about to lumber jerkily round the headland. There are no beach umbrellas or sun loungers. No one comes out each morning to clear away the litter, but the waves and currents seem to wash up a better class of flotsam, jetsam and driftwood than on most Mediterranean beaches. Behind it in the narrow valley, a clear green stream runs slowly through groves of fig and maple.

In recent decades a few houses have been built on the hillside, painted white with standard Aegean blue woodwork and terracotta ridge tiles, not as pretty as Dodecanese neoclassical or Cycladic cubist but unobtrusive. Where the stream meets the beach, it forms a small lagoon, circled by swallows, deep enough for diving and safe for swimming even when the sea is rough.

On one side is an old jetty and behind it the ruins of a small temple and sanctuary of Artemis dating from the sixth century BC. The Greeks liked to build their temples in beautiful places and this is certainly a beautiful place, particularly in midsummer with the sun setting in the middle of the bay.

Daedalus and Icarus were inventor-craftsmen in a time when the link between technology and magic had not been broken (it’s never the same when you know how it’s done). Secrets weren’t shared but passed down only from father to son, often lost entirely if the son died young. In 560BC, a pair of real-life craftsmen-magicians, Chersiphron and his son Metagenes, came this way from Knossos in Crete to build the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the seven wonders of the world. Perhaps they built this one as well. It used the same techniques and had a similar design, although on a much smaller scale.

For obscure geological reasons the island is not prone to earthquakes, and the temple stood pretty much intact until 1859 when most of the stones were taken away to build the church up the hill in the village of Christos Raches, and its statues smashed in a rare display of Orthodox fundamentalism. Their eyes were said to follow you about — not a difficult trick when you know how to do it but unsettling and possibly devilish if you don’t.

The temple very nearly survived. In 1842, only 17 years before, the German archaeologist Ludwig Ross had planned to explore the north coast of Icaria but was turned back by rough seas. Had he made it, Nas would have become famous, one of the little wonders of the world. It is not difficult to picture the temple as it would have been had they let it be. But you can also picture the large hotels in the hills behind and the gift shops selling plastic and plaster of Paris copies of the Artemis of Icaria (the original would be in the Louvre or the British Museum), the barriers and the men in uniform blowing whistles when the crowds walk in the wrong place.

Only the granite foundations remain, littered with marble chippings of the broken statues. But in its ruined state, you can have the place to yourself. Exploring the stream, you discover the capital of one of the columns in a stepping stone bridge.

Among her many official duties, Artemis was a protector of travellers, but like all Greek gods she was dangerous to cross. The hunter Actaeon accidentally discovered her bathing in a stream much like this one; her modesty affronted, she turned him into a stag and he was torn to pieces by his own hounds — an undeserved fate, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The woman walking along Nas beach is less concerned about her modesty. Silhouetted by the late evening sun she takes on an almost mythic quality. She glances in your directionthen turns quite leisurely away and walks calmly on.

Even without the temple, Nas is an unlikely survival. Icaria must be the only island in Greece that gets fewer foreign tourists than it did 10 years ago. Not that it ever got many; until recently, even the better guidebooks often ignored it completely. And the Greek government has never been keen to promote Icaria as a tourist destination — it has always been too independent a place, the Red Island, the Cuba in the Aegean; after the civil war and under the colonels it was used as a dumping ground for unwanted left-wing intellectuals. On a wall near Campos is a large mural of Che Guevara; elsewhere you find peace signs and political graffiti, sometimes with helpful English subtitles (“Fuck the police!”).

And Icaria has been protected from overdevelopment by its remoteness (a full day’s journey from England) and by the wildness of the sea. Except in times of flat calm, there are dangerous currents and undertows even off the safest looking beaches. It is no place for expensive, delicate boats, and the yachties who pioneered the eastern Mediterranean islands as tourist destinations gave the Icarian sea a wide berth.

But perhaps the main reason why Icaria has not been developed is that the islanders have never been particularly bothered. Strangers are welcome but the entrepreneurial spirit does not run deep. Their few attempts at making money have been pretty hopeless. During the five months in 1912 when it was an independent country — the Free State of Icaria, no less — someone had the bright idea of printing their own stamps to sell to collectors, but they forgot to destroy the plates and the market was flooded with fakes. Overambitious plans to develop the hot springs on the south coast came to nothing beyond a large sign in the harbour at Ayios Kyrikos saying “Welcome to the island of radiation!”

This is the Greece that is so attractive to people who love the place and infuriating to those who don’t; where nothing quite works as it should and nothing ever happens on time. Shops can be closed all day then be open for business at 2am, selling everything apart from the one thing you wanted, the shopkeeper for reasons never explained insisting that you really need to buy some garden shears. You go to the pharmacy for something to settle your stomach and the chemist gives you a large glass of his mother’s home-distilled spirit and refuses payment.

Even in the height of summer when the beaches are crowded, you can find waterfalls in the hills for swimming, entirely deserted. And every week there seems to be a village festival where you can eat roast goat flavoured with fennel and oregano, drink local wine, listen to real Greek music and join unselfconsciously in real Greek dancing, or not. Just like it always was.

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