ALMOST every Land Rover enthusiast I’ve interviewed over the years has had a story to tell about learning to drive as a teenager in a Land Rover owned by mum, dad, a relative or a family friend. Tim Dines has jumped to the top of the leaderboard, though, because he first took the wheel of his uncle Barry’s Land Rover aged five, although he confesses that he wasn’t doing much more than steering it through the woods, given that his feet couldn’t reach the floor, let alone the pedals.
“My lifelong love of Land Rovers began in 1963,” Tim tells me. “We lived in Kent and in the ferocious winter of 1963 we were snowed in for a couple of weeks, and the first vehicle to get through to us was a Land Rover driven by uncle Barry. I was five-years old and hugely impressed!
“Some years later I had a school friend who was a couple of years older than me, and he had acquired a Land Rover and started trialling, and I decided this was something I was going to get into as well. My parents had bought an old school on Dartmoor and were doing
