Down in the Pays Basque, the young natives are disconsolate. Immobiliers (estate agents) with sharp English marketing techniques are sprouting like radishes in the towns. In the markets, one hears three languages: Basque, French and English. And, astonishingly, in a nation so protective of its culture, some houses this summer had signs advertising them For Sale instead of À Vendre.

It was my French niece who saw them, out on her travels as a veterinary surgeon, and she came home to her small, rented house and dropped her handbag with an exasperated clunk on the table. What hope do we have of ever being able to afford a house, she said, when the Brits are paying crazy prices and we can’t compete? It’s just so depressing.

She’s 30; she and her partner, who is also a vet, have a new baby and the same aspirations as every other young couple: a house of their own, with a view, a garden, a chance to put down their roots. But for the next few years, while they are establishing themselves professionally, the best they can do to protect themselves from the inexorable rise in house prices is buy a plot and keep it, undeveloped. Their dreams of doing up a little farmhouse on a hill lie sour in their mouths.

And still the Brits keep coming, pouring off the Ryanair jets to Pau and Biarritz, with brochures under their arms and that proprietorial bounce that a mission to spend lots of money gives you. My niece resents it. She overhears them when they bring her their dogs to inject, with their talk of swimming pools and €20,000 kitchens. Shall they choose marble? Or mosaic? And why not a hot tub as well? They love her of course, because she speaks English, and she’s charming, but that she’s bilingual means nothing: these days veterinary jobs in France often request spoken English. It’s the future.

Meanwhile, back in the invading nation’s home territory, property investment brokers are stoking the fire. Searching for clever, undiscovered areas in France to buy? Look no further than the Pyrenees-Atlantiques, say the experts. Such areas are “highly accessible and attractively priced” . It’s easy, see? Adopt a general’s ruthless battle strategy for this bloodless invasion. Feel no guilt, question nothing. Don’t waste a minute worrying about the negative impact on poor old France. Just relish the almost sexual thrill of such disproportionate spending power. A ruined farmhouse for how much? Only €90,000? No wonder they call it property porn.

And so the British rush to the French countryside has become unstoppable. At a very conservative estimate, Britons now own 200,000 properties, with more than 100,000 residing full-time – double the figure of five years earlier – but the numbers are out of date almost as you quote them, for British migration to France is believed to be running at just over 40,000 a year. As a result, the average house price in France has risen by 120 per cent over the past ten years.

There is anger. My niece expresses a very moderate form of what is an unmistakeable mood. Even as the French appreciate the affluence that the British money brings, they resent the power of the invaders to displace their young and change their traditions. Who wouldn’t?

In some villages in southwest of France, a third of the houses are British holiday homes, and a lot of the rest are Dutch. For the deeply rural French, the immigration is insensitive and offensive, and some liken the British to the Algerians, gathering in ghettoes in the city suburbs. In some villages there has been an increase in votes for the far Right.

There are analogies with Scotland, where rural villages have been bought up by the rich invaders from the Central Belt and England. Take the island of Arran, snapped up by the wealthy for holiday houses, or a Highland postcard village such as Plockton, all sea, mountains and cute cottages – so cute, in fact, that you can’t get one for less than £300,000 these days, despite the tin roofs and that you couldn’t swing a cat in them. A wonderful windfall, of course, for a few lucky locals, but a real tragedy for the community as a whole, which has not a hope of attracting nurses, teachers, snowplough drivers and paramedics – for even if you tripled these workers’ salaries they still couldn’t afford to live there. And so schools shut; and in winter, when the holiday houses are boarded up, these places become ghost villages, and councils struggle to maintain public services for the elderly who remain. Indigenous Scots are readily sickened by the avalanche of money that has rendered them impotent. Little wonder the Scottish National Party is doing so well. In their shoes, I’d vote for it too.

In another incarnation, I used to be in charge of a property price guide, and it made me queasy, celebrating 30 per cent year-on-year price rises in fragile, rural communities. The effects of property inflation are anything but simple; at worst, buying a second home in a remote, beautiful place is a form of exploitation; at best it is never a victimless crime.

Yes, the thought of France is seductive. Great friends of mine sold up last year, bought a gem of a house in Lot-et-Garonne, and have enough money left to pay them a modest income for the rest of their life. How tempting is that: in early middle-age, never to have to work again? Hugely. But I think of my niece; think of the humourless Dutch neighbours; and the complacent, ubiquitous Brits; and I think I’ll just keep working. Someone has to.

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