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Partly for this reason, Cummings had to do much of the heavy work himself. And he still does it. When I visited the abbey recently, he seemed always to be carrying heavy luggage, bustling in and out of the kitchens to conspire with his chef and maître d’, nagging the people who installed the sewage system, carrying rocks for stonemasons or blasting plane-tree seeds off the drive with a piece of equipment strapped to his back that looked, at a distance, like some kind of jet pack. When he didn’t have anything else to do, he ferried his children to and from schools and supplementary English or French lessons.

Setting aside working hours, and a tax system that drives him potty, Cummings has huge respect for the French. “They love to know which farms the food comes from. If you said you bought chickens from Hervé, they may say, ‘But his chickens are shit! You should get them from so-and-so.’ These are people who appreciate the sweat and hard work you put into the job.”

And that’s why Cummings so quickly secured the ultimate approval for l’Abbaye de la Bussière: membership of the prestigious international Relais & Chateaux association, comprising many of the world’s leading hotels and restaurants, and – just a year after opening – a Michelin star for the restaurant run by his 28-year-old chef, Olivier Elzer.

Like Cummings in the early days, Karen and Nick Kitchener were long ago made aware that their nationality might be a problem in France. The couple, who previously worked in IT sales and marketing, bought a French vineyard, Domaine de Lauroux, in the southwestern region of Gascony in 2003. Their wines have won prizes, and recommendations from prestigious independent publications such as the Guide Hachette; the Kitcheners were recently invited to London to present their wines at the French embassy to potential buyers.

But in their local shop the Kitcheners’ product hasn’t gone down well. “You have to put your name on the label,” Karen says, “and our name does not sound French. A friend of ours heard someone in the shop saying they would not buy a wine, even a wine called Domaine de Lauroux, if it’s made by someone with that name.”

Another reason for the Kitcheners’ difficulties, she believes, is their out-of-the-way location. People in the poorly connected region of Gascony, she says, are notoriously reluctant to accept change. “A standing joke among the parents at the local school” – which the Kitcheners’ eight-year-old son has attended since he was three – “is to say, ‘My son doesn’t need to count higher than 20 because we have only 20 chickens.’ We’d both done French A-level, and we’d spent a lot of holidays in France. We came here and thought this was a good place. But you could live here for 35 years and you will still be a foreigner.”

It’s not all bad: the local restaurant features the Kitcheners’ wine on its menu formule. But the Kitcheners don’t depend on local people for their success. Much of their wine is sold for export, not only to the UK but also to Germany and elsewhere, and thanks to their background in sales and marketing, they have managed to attract plenty of tourists to the vineyard.

Would they have done better in another part of France? At the last count there were 670,000 Britons in France, and most were concentrated in the Ile-de-France (which includes Paris) and the north. Here, British immigrants are so common, they seem to have little problem integrating.

One, Ken Tatham, is a bearded Yorkshire-born sales-and-marketing man who has lived in France for 40 years – his wife is French. For the last decade and more, he has served as mayor of his village in Normandy, Saint-Céneri-le-Gérei. His duties include raising taxes, managing local roads, looking after public buildings and registering births, marriages and deaths. There is also an endless list of unofficial services. “Basically, people ring you up at any hour of the day or night about anything,” he says.

Although he would appear to have fitted in – and added French citizenship to his rights as a Brit 15 years ago – Tatham is still known to his mostly French constituents as the English mayor. (Not surprising, perhaps, since his business, Take French Leave, involves helping other Brits buy property in France.) “Some people are startled to hear that I can speak French. I heard one man say to his friend, ‘Actually, he’s quite a nice guy.’ ”

Two men much younger than Tatham, but already integrated almost as much as him into French life, are the Peake brothers, Jonathan, 35, and Graeme, 29, originally from Cornwall but now based in Brittany, in the far northwest. (They have a brother, Kevin, 33, who is likewise embedded into French life but lives some distance away, at Tours.)

The Peake boys never set out to build a new life in France. It just turned out that way. In 1990, Jonathan was apprenticed to their father, Colin, a plumber, and came to France to help convert a house. While the work continued, Jonathan joined the local cycling club at St Brieuc and made friends there. It was a club with a great history, whose members had included the great British cyclist Tommy Simpson and the five-times Tour de France winner, Bernard Hinault.

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