Villages in Cornwall are "inches away from becoming forever fossilized" according to a Government minister.
Planning minister Nick Boles said second homes were to blame for the dire situation of rural villages being left "strangely lifeless".
Mr Boles made the alarmingly frank analysis in a speech to the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
He said: "In Devon, Cornwall, Shropshire, Sussex, the Cotswolds and the Yorkshire Dales - some villages are inches away from becoming forever fossilised."
The planning minister painted a damning picture of a typical village.
He said: "The houses are so greatly prized by holiday-makers and those who have recently retired and sold a valuable property in the Home Counties, that young people working on nearby farms, local plumbers, carpenters and gardeners, the couple running the fish restaurant that the holiday-makers love to show off to their friends, none of them can afford even the tiniest cottage. As a result, the village is eerily empty during the winter months.
"The school closed long ago, the pub and the shop are teetering on the brink and the whole place feels very odd. Beautiful certainly but somehow sanitised: all the stone walls recently repointed and even the most humble doors lavishly painted in greys and greens from Farrow and Ball. Perfectly preserved. But strangely lifeless."
Mr Boles, whose parents live in Talaton, East Devon, made the speech as a backdrop to a Government announcement of investment in 165,000 more affordable homes between 2015 and 2018.
He said: "This year, next year, every year of this decade, we need to build more houses so that they become affordable for working people on ordinary incomes again. And not just on brownfield sites in cities. But in bits of the countryside too."
