I measure my decline against the mountain’s incline. This year I was still able, slowly, to walk up from Anavriti to Livadi, from 700 metres above sea level to 1400 metres and then back down by a more circuitous route which involved a little more ascending.

I saw Livadi’s slow reforestation. It was a summer settlement, a clearing with meadows – the name means meadow – some arable land also. Some field walls are still visible, and the remains of a sheep fold, though I didn’t see the threshing floor which George later mentioned. The forest’s progress is slow; tree seedlings find it hard to get established in the dense grassland fabric. But it’s steady.

In Scotland we still see the ruins of many shielings, summer settlements in the highlands.Some exist more boldly on ordnance survey maps than on the ground. In the alps cattle are still taken up to high pastures where they graze on flower rich pastures from late June till September. Smallholders and weekend farmers in a populous Swiss valley might have just one or two animals, together on the mountain they make up a flock which one person or a couple or a family is paid to care for and still, sometimes, make cheese, in a rare survival of an old communality.

At Livadi the open ground allows mountain flowers to grow at an unusually low altitude alongside meadow flowers at their upper limit. It’s a place of two worlds. Or rather, it is its own place, but vanishing.

In Anavriti is a beautiful old ruin, cold blue and warm sandy yellow paint still holding on to the surviving render, which I’ve taken photos of over the last seven years, recording its decline. Now I can’t find it. Now it’s not there. Could it have collapsed and disappeared since last year, overgrown by luxurious clematis? Or can I no longer find my way around? Greek villages are often not laid out in streets; houses may be linked by narrow paths and little cut-throughs which, when the houses are abandoned, become choked with plants or blocked by falling masonry. Years of gradual decay but the roof still largely intact and then – nothing? Yet I searched. Along the road, along the paths. Peered everywhere, so I thought.

Just before sitting down to write I read that Greece is ‘preparing for the new wild fire season’.

Much later I sent a message to Maria in Anavriti, and she tells me that the old house is still there. So, it seems that my cognitive faculties (some of them, some of the time) are falling into ruin more quickly than that abandoned house. One year on and at the moment the thought of a 700 metre ascent is a dream.