More self-deluding guff is written about Greek islands than about anywhere else on the planet.

Their enduring out-of-the-wayness, raw beauty and sparse, matriarchal communities, even now, foster the illusion of personal discovery - of ownership almost, as if we were staking out a private paradise handed down by Homer.

There is another illusion, too, a hang-over from the islands’ colonisation by hippies, of a freewheeling, free-loving detachment from time and toil, in which everything drips with honey.

Within a day or two we are on first-name terms with at least one fisherman and a shepherd, and eating goat with our fingers.

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Not everyone buys into it, though.

One visitor to Alonnisos, the northernmost and most beautiful inhabited island of the northern Sporades, described its nameless hilltop settlement, the Chora (old village), as “Disneyland”.

This was gratuitously insulting, but I could see what he meant. The village appears typically Greek - old houses leaning against new; ruins craning suicidally over a hanging precipice; narrow stepped lanes lazily furred with cats. The postcard view is classic, a heroic blend of beauty and endeavour, where ingenuity is spiked with cussedness.

Buildings are suckered like limpets onto rocks; roads twirl around contours and unravel in deep, thyme-scented voids that spill onto beaches. “Unspoilt” is the lamest of clichés, but it fits.

The illusion is to believe that unspoilt means unchanged. The village, fortified and built at a commanding height, was once the capital of a well-populated island known for its wines.

Phylloxera in the 1950s did for the vines; an earthquake in 1965 did for the houses. What happened next mirrored the destiny of islands right across the Aegean and Ionian seas. Over the water came not the murderous pirates that had once driven people into their mountain redoubt, but a waft of hippies lured by the promise of lotus-eating (in reality, bread and tomatoes) and the absence of sniffer dogs. The die was cast.

In their sandalprints soon came escalating numbers of conventional tourists, to whom the more enterprising villagers rented rooms that often bore the imprint of hen or goat but cemented the islands’ reputation for rustic charm. The innocence of these places overwhelmed us. People wrote seriously of beauty that made them weep.

The beauty is still there, but the innocence has taken a hit. The last pack-saddle maker in Alonnisos died 20 years ago; his tools are in the local museum in Patitiri. So are the relics of the wine-making industry, agriculture and other traditional crafts (piracy and guerrilla warfare included). In the hills, olives, pomegranates and lemons drop from trees no longer harvested.

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