Milos, a Cycladic Island

The island forms a near horseshoe around a huge flooded caldera, the largest natural harbour in Greece, 2 miles across, where the Royal Navy sheltered during the first world war.

Whilst the violent explosions creating such a gigantic feature preceded the last ice age, the hot spot on the boundary between the European and African tectonic plates remains active, witness the numerous hot springs and sulphurous caves, easy to imagine as the lairs of sea nymphs, and cult locations where mortals encountered the gods.

Volcanic activity has produced mineralisation. We camped in what is now a deserted sulphur mine. There are a number of currently worked quarries and open cast mines, the products shipped out directly from the coastal workings, too remote to be connected to the island's road network.

Milesian obsidian, black volcanic glass which forms and keeps an edge was extracted for blades and knives. There is evidence of it being traded from Milos from as early as the 8th millennium BC, its use continuing from the Neolithic into the copper and bronze ages.

Some four-fifths of the Island is uncultivated and mountainous with the cultivated land concentrated around the east side of the natural harbour, Omos Milou. The volcanic rock is also porous meaning there is a shortage of surface water and Renfrew and Wagstaffe's study "Milos; an Island Polity" (1982) records farmers walking miles between individual fields.

Remnant terrace systems are evidence of farmers' struggle against erosion and downslope soil loss, the terraces themselves now largely abandoned except where they are used as gardens or allotments close to current settlements.

Like other island communities, Milos has experienced periods of expanding and contracting population reflected in periodic appearances from obscurity into the history, notably in Thucydides "The Peleponnesian War", perhaps the oldest surviving work of narrative history. The Milesians had wished to remain neutral in the war between Athens and the Spartan led Peloponnesian League before eventually opting for the latter, incurring Athens's revenge, revenge it wreaked by slaughtering the men and enslaving the woman and children, an event described by the dramatist Euripides in his play "The Trojan Women".

Much later Milesian pilots guided shipping through the Eastern Mediterranean, including piloting the Royal and French Navies to their victory over the Turks at Navarino in 1827, a key event leading to the creation of modern Greece from the declining Ottoman empire.

More recently rural depopulation has been succeeded by the seasonal prosperity brought by tourism, and reverse population flows as emigrants return on retirement. Thus Milos had a population of 17,600 in 1907, 4,400 in 1991 and 4,800 in 2001.

The island's archaeology and landscapes are also characterised by locational shift, the extent of which indicative of the length of Milos's settlement history

Phylokopi, its importance deriving at least in part from the obsidian trade, on the North East coast of the Island dates back to the Bronze Age, to 3000 BC or earlier, which makes it one of the earliest urban or proto urban sites in Europe. The site was occupied for at least two millenia and has been extensively excavated by the British School of Archaeology. Sited on cliffs it is being eroded by the sea, something very apparent to us as we stood there in a force 9 from the North, above a horrendous sea. That we were paddling past the same spot in benign conditions a day and a half later, shows that in the Aegean, with a small fetch, the sea calms down very quickly after a storm.

The Classical city stood on the slopes between the present upper villages and the Omos Milou, the site still marked by a Greek theatre and superb extant walls, incorporating naturally pentagonal basaltic stones. It was here in the early 19th century that the Venus de Milo was uncovered, its quality from a relative Classical backwater indicative of what has been lost. The statute is famously armless, the link to Marc Quinn's "Alison Lapper Pregnant", the stunning white marble sculpture of a nude thalidomide victim which currently occupies the previously empty fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square, obvious to those who have seen even photographs of both statues.

During the Frankish and Venetian period following the sack of Byzantium by the Fourth Crusade, the island's capital was at Kastro, the basaltic citadel above the current upper villages.

In Ottoman period when the island was a nest of piracy, piracy and slavery themselves, according to Horden and Purcell, "cabotage by other means", the capital moved to another inland site, Zefina, further to the South. This site in turn was largely abandoned following an outbreak of plague.

The island's largest town is now Adamas, the ferry port on the eastern side of Omos Milau, founded by Cretan refugees from an unsuccessful uprising against the Turks in the early 19th century. More charmingly Greek are the 4 upper villages North West of Adamas, white like the Villos Blancos of Andalucia and like them the huddled together around hilltops.

On my last day in Milos I walked alone from the upper villages down through the skeleton of the classical city, on one of those cobbled and now largely abandoned steep paths you find in the Mediterranean to the tiny harbour of Kilma, comprising two storey brightly painted houses, the ground floors serving as boat houses, the upper floors seasonal accommodation. For someone used to much bigger tides the houses were set unbelievably close to the sea's edge.

Returning through the terraces and gardens, I thought this is the paddling for me, tavernas, warm seas in November, empty beaches out of high season, a wonderful and complex coastline, the possibility of innumerable journeys between the Greek Mainland, the islands and Crete, and with history and archaeology and culture and books to read, and more richness and past and possibilities than you can dream of.