“Watch the thumbs!”

It’s the first rule of offroading. Don’t hook your thumbs around the wheel. You could end up having them sprained or broken if it spins as the vehicle’s wheels jerk around in a rut or hole.

Bloody painful, I’m told.

And no matter how skilled the off-road driver, it’s the first reminder they get from any of the instructors at the Land Rover Experience 4x4 course in Aughrim, Co Wicklow.

Slogging a 4x4 up across 1,500 acres of mountain, on a maze of dirt roads, running streams, water pits, mud, woods and hillside gravel tracks, is a great way to forget the stress of modern living. There’s something about wrestling with the wild that antidotes the daily grind of gridlocks, filling forms, writing reports and managing a business operation that you might not even like very much.

And as for the hassle from the bank manager and the other petty beurocrats who lay siege to the offices which most of us work in, this really is getting away from it all.

Rain or shine - in fact, the chances are you’ll get both in any particular hour - it is invigorating, a painmaker for muscles you never knew existed in your shoulders, a challenge of many grades, an appetite builder ... and a fount of conversation stoppers when the talk of the rough on the 16th hole gets to be just too much in the golf club’s bar.

(“I knew that if I didn’t hit at just the right angle, she’d slew to the right and I’d not lift it to the other side.”)

Nothing about golf there. Really. That was about going into one of the water hazards on the Aughrim mountainside. Where even a Land Rover Defender guided by very experienced hands can balk and require another go, or three, to get out.

And the nice thing about it all is, that if you are a Land Rover vehicle buyer, you now get the opportunity to drive a similar vehicle offroad under expert tuition. Which is something that a lot of your pals in the same golf club, who buy other makes of 4x4 SUVs mainly for their macho looks, probably never will have done.

“The truth is, about nine out of ten 4x4 buyers probably never go more offroad than their driveways, or the field where they park the horseboxes at the Pony Club events,” says Dave Harpur, managing director of Land Rover Ireland. “They never know just what their vehicles are capable of. So we’re now making sure that at the very least they know what their Freelander, Discovery, or Range Rover can do.”

He doesn’t mention Defender buyers. They usually work their vehicles, and buy them for the work they can do. Which doesn’t much involve driving long distances on tarmac roads.

And for those same new L-R owners, the ‘Experience’ can be an eye-opener. Not just the toughness of the terrain they’re asked to drive on, but also the essential simplicity of how to drive the most basic offroader.

“Off the clutch, off the brake. Let the engine bring you down,” says Tony to a newcomer. He’s one of the regular instructors at the Aughrim site, which has been in operation now for 11 years but only lately this year with the Land Rover Experience business.

Yep, that’s the second key rule of offroading. When you’re going down that 40deg slope, leave the pedals alone. Provided you have a full set of low ratios. More about the alternatives later.

Many of you reading this magazine know all this, of course. And more. But maybe many of you don’t. Particularly if you’ve bought for the image, or simply never got around to finding out the capabilities of your vehicle, or of yourself.

More and more are doing so, though. Through the likes of corporate events. And that shows up a number of things. Particularly in mixed genders.

“The women are better than the men,” says Tony. “They listen better to what you say. The lads think they know it all, and they charge on. Which, as they find out, is not the way.”

True, because this is the third rule of offroading. Slow is fast. The slower your wheels, the better the traction. The slower the speeds, the more control you have when you hit the rough stuff. The slower you go, the less heaving the vehicle will do and the less chance you have of bending the transmission on a rock.

There are other important things to learn, particularly about the proliferation of aids for travelling offroad in vehicles like the Freelander, the Discovery and the Range Rover (the Defender doesn’t bother with anything more tech than ABS and a diff lock. And even the ABS is a bit superfluous, in the opinion of most owners).

For instance, the latest Discovery has pretty well all the possible electronic aids to safe and practical on- and off-road performance, including the Hill Descent Control pioneered on the smaller ‘softroader’ Freelander, and ABS with EBD and Brake Assist. These also include Active Cornering Enhancement which automatically stiffens the suspension if there’s a propensity to body roll on a highway turn. It works offroad, too, allowing greater articulation of the suspension/wheels systems.

“They all work well, but bring their own responsibilities,” says Sandy, another regular instructor at Aughrim. “Owners should know the basics of how to travel offroad, and get back again, because sometimes the electronics are so good that they can bring them too far out, and then if something goes wrong they can have difficulty getting back.”

It’s rather the same in road cars, which have become so safe and so comfortable, and so cocooned from the road conditions that drivers can too easily find themselves travelling at rates beyond their own experience or capacity to recover from trouble.

But anybody taking up Land Rover’s invitation to do the ‘Experience’ will come down from the mountain with a new respect for the dangers inherent in going off the highway, and will hopefully also have gained new abilities.

And the appetite developed during the day on the mountain will have helped them appreciate the value of a good piece of meat barbecued on an open flame at the back of the ‘Experience’ base cabin.

The only bit that will be exactly the same is the slow speed slog in the barely moving gridlock on the Stillorgan Road at 8.30 of a weekday morning.

And if a fellow-traveller happens to look up and see an ‘Experience’ veteran smiling slightly as he waits to inch his Discovery another car length on outside the RTE campus, he’ll hardly guess that he’s watching a daydreamer once again successfully pushing his vehicle safely through ‘Grand Canyon’ or a four-foot water hazard on a south Wicklow mountainside.

Just watch the thumbs.