Land Rover Cross Country Trials - The Christmas Cup

The British at play—what’s not to like? Few nations can match the sheer enthusiasm with which Britons throw themselves into activities that, to the untrained eye, appear to have been devised during a long winter evening with nothing but a pot of tea and a slightly suspect imagination for company.

Take, for instance, the Southern Rover Owners Club, which gathers each year in the peaceful village of Cowbeech, East Sussex, to compete for their annual Christmas Cup. It is a scene of gleeful seriousness: stout boots, woolly hats, machinery capable of crossing rivers and rearranging small hills, and an atmosphere suggesting that no one has ever been more delighted to be ankle-deep in mud.

The trials themselves are marvellously straightforward in that uniquely British way that is not remotely straightforward at all. Competitors face a series of sections marked out by pairs of sticks or canes—‘gates,’ in the local parlance—which define the route. The task is to thread one’s Land Rover through a dozen such gates without touching them or stopping. This, it turns out, requires the kind of precision driving normally associated with brain surgeons or people attempting to parallel-park in central London.

The result is a charming mixture of concentration, wheel-spinning drama, and occasional unexpected detours into shrubbery—all performed with good humour, great camaraderie, and the sort of stoic cheer that seems hard-wired into the British countryside.

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