“If you do a lot of towing off-road you may wish to fit a Nato-style tow hitch”

identification number laser cut into the chassis. VIN plates can be swapped, but it would be hard to get rid of this!

The Land Rover’s reputation for towing is well deserved, but not even a good 4x4 can prevent you getting stuck if you attempt to tow a heavy trailer or caravan across soft ground. It’s something that traps the unwary all the time. Dad towing the horsebox for his daughter’s gymkhana drives onto what looks like an innocuous grass field only for the wheels of the horse box to sink to their axles on a soft bit of ground.

It catches out the experienced enthusiasts, too. A few years back at the Billing Show a downpour turned the grassy fields into a quagmire, with some owners having to winch their heavily-laden vehicles and caravans off the soggy site at the end of the weekend!

So you can see that towing a heavy trailer or caravan off-road does have its pitfalls. The biggest problem is that the laden trailer often weighs more than the 4x4 itself, yet it has poorer ground clearance (due to the need to keep the centre of gravity as low as possible) and narrow tyres on the axles, which will dig in deeper than the tyres on your vehicle.

This means that places where you’d be able to drive without a problem in your Land Rover will see you stuck when you attempt to pull a heavy trailer through. The resistance of a trailer sinking into soft ground, where its chassis can act like an anchor, will be enough to see your Land Rover grind to a halt, too.

And your problems don’t end there. The standard tow ball is not designed for extreme angles between the vehicle and trailer, neither laterally nor horizontally. This means that a heavily-potholed track can cause real problems, as can abrupt undulations in the surface you’re driving over. In the worst-case scenario, the forces generated can even break your tow bar or damage the trailer neck.

If you do a lot of towing off-road, or you decide to take your vehicle and trailer into extreme off-road situations – perhaps on an overland expedition across Africa, for example – you may wish to fit a Nato-style tow hitch. Developed by the military, it allows articulation both up and down and from side to side across all types of terrain without risk of failure, but if you don’t want to swap tow hitches be very careful in how you drive on uneven surfaces and on slopes.

The uneven surfaces you are likely to drive off-road will also have an impact upon what you’re carrying. Everything should be lashed down or secured – in the case of a vehicle on a trailer with very strong straps to prevent it from moving around. In a caravan, everything breakable should be stowed away carefully.

Happily, it is possible to tow heavy trailers off-road without coming to grief. As usual, it takes a bit of preparation and some thought on