Andreas Whittam Smith: The English are romantics, the French pragmatists

They don't lovingly restore old cottages and barns. They would rather build new houses

As we British holidaymakers cross the Channel this summer, more of us than ever before are travelling to properties we own in France. British purchasers undertake many thousands of transactions a year with a total sales value in the billions of pounds. For financial reasons, the English town dweller's dream of owning a country cottage is more easily realised in France than it is in England itself. As compared with English house prices, French property has become - in real terms - even cheaper in recent years.

As a result, the number of British-owned dwellings is rising fast. Between 2003 and 2005, the latest year for which figures are available, the total rose by a staggering 32 per cent to reach 71,000. A French journalist, José-Alain Fralon, who published a book last year entitled Au Secours, Les Anglais Nous Envahissent! (Help, the English are invading) understands our motives perhaps better than we do ourselves. He says that when we tell our French neighbours that we love France dearly, that we even wish to die there, we are not telling the whole truth. Don't be deceived, he tells his fellow citizens, these English settlers think that they are still in England: "In a mythic England, yes, in an England of their dreams, indeed, but in England all the same."

This is an accurate observation. It captures our romantic attachment to the countryside. The French attitude to rural life is very different. It is much less sentimental. The French don't lovingly restore old cottages and barns as we do. They would rather build new houses. The countryside is full of these utilitarian structures, with their cream-coloured walls, fancy ironwork and subterranean garages. I cannot imagine there are many English buyers for such properties. In the French imagination the countryside isn't old buildings and hedgerows but rather extended families and peasant solidarity where anticlericalism and hostility to landlords linger on. We, on the other hand, search for an unblemished rural existence, simple and tranquil, everyone happily occupying their allotted place. This has been the English dream since the enclosures of the 18th century and the Industrial Revolution that followed.

Consider where we buy our French properties. We don't particularly focus on coastal regions, though one of the Brittany départements, Côtes d'Armor, has a high concentration, as does the Var and the Alpes-Maritimes in the south. Rather we search inland for the most unspoilt rural settings we can find. From the Dordogne, for instance, where more than 3,000 properties are British-owned and which has become a bit overcrowded, we have tended to move north west and north east. As a result there is now a sizeable British presence in the Charente, Haute-Vienne, Creuse, Indre, Vienne and Deux Sèvres. Indeed in the Indre and Haute-Vienne, British ownership has doubled in three years.

Looking at a map of the distribution of British holiday homes in France, the newspaper Le Monde made a surprising discovery. The heavier concentrations are found in the west of France almost exclusively within the old boundaries of Plantagenet France. In other words, the new English plantation is following a 12th-century pattern, when the English king, Henry II, also ruled Normandy, Brittany and the lands of the Loire, Poitou-Charentes and Aquitaine. (This is the same Henry II who famously asked of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?") As one French tourism expert put it: "The English tend to disperse themselves as if instinctively they wish to reconstitute the Plantagenet kingdom." And as a matter of fact, there are few British owners of holiday property in other pretty parts of France, such as the Ardennes, the Marne, the Moselle, the countryside round Paris, or in the départements of the lower and upper Rhine. These places are just as pleasing to the eye in terms of beautiful countryside, but somehow we are not attracted. Compare this with the Dutch, for instance who are everywhere, or with the Irish, who resolutely stick to the Mediterranean coastal lands.

What does undoubtedly influence the direction of English investment in French property is the route map of cheap flights. The proliferation of western and southern destinations in recent years - Brest, Rennes, Nantes, Angers, Tours, La Rochelle, Limoges, Bergerac, Rodez, Toulon, Nîmes, Perpignan, Carcassonne, Pau, Biarritz - has only added to the appeal of establishing homes in those areas.

By contrast, French settlement in Britain has been for strictly economic reasons. There is a strong wave at present as thousands of young French people come to work in London. They are attracted by the availability of jobs and by the lure of the financial markets. Nowadays in the capital, beyond the tourist attractions, you hear almost as much French spoken as you do English in Paris. And this wave also has a precedent from centuries past - the arrival of more than 100,000 French protestants, the Huguenots, in the years following 1685 as a result of the re-imposition of religious restrictions.

This is not what we expect to find - the English romantic, the French pragmatic. But in following a dream of rural bliss we penetrate the most obscure parts of the French countryside while the French, when they reverse the flow, do so for the strictly practical reasons of seeking employment.