The greatest ever Land Rover discovery
For how many years have we all been predicting that the last of the great barnfinds must already have been discovered, that there surely can’t be any more out there? Yet still they come, a bit less thick and fast perhaps and with varying degrees of actual discovery, and more moody chassis-number clones among the ranks of the genuine. And yet still they come.
Many are actually cars or collections that are known about but kept hidden until the time is right – as was the case with the extraordinary Baillon collection – or an owner who just doesn’t want to sell and is fed up with being bothered. For example, however the papers portrayed the unearthing of Dr Harold Carr’s 1937 Bugatti Type 57S Atalante in a Tyneside garage after his death in 2007, so many people in the industry knew about it and had slipped offers through his door that he must have had a stack of envelopes piling up to the letterbox.
Likewise, plenty of people knew that there was a 1925 Bugatti Brescia in Lake Maggiore long before it was dragged out. What was especially interesting in that case was how many other cars were allegedly out there with the same chassis number…
But, while the headlines continue to be made by the big-ticket cars that might have been particularly well-spun, genuine history-changing discoveries are still being made, too. And ‘our’ prototype Land-Rover falls into that category. Just imagine something so important hiding in plain sight in a domestic garden for so many decades, and so close to its home that it was under the experts’ noses, without coming to light until now.
It almost beggars belief, but it also convinces me that no-one should ever be rash enough to assume that there will be no more great discoveries.
The story starts on page 70, written by our own Land Rover expert Mark Dixon.