There aren’t many castles with their own Land Rover colour. But then again, Eastnor isn’t like other castles. Since 1962, every Land Rover has been tested on our 66 miles of mud, water troughs and woodland tracks – a connection that led Forbes to describe us as “the spiritual home of Land Rover”.
For Dave Griffiths, head of global brand experience at JLR, the relationship is more than professional. He grew up on a sheep farm just over the hill in Gloucestershire, visiting Eastnor’s Deer Park as a child and buying fencing supplies from what is now the Woodshed Café. Later, at 21, he arrived for what was meant to be a two-week stint helping maintain the Land Rover Experience tracks – a stopgap summer job that turned into a career spanning more than two decades.
‘I grew up alongside the Eastnor Castle estate,’ he says, gesturing to the hills beyond the library windows. ‘Thousands of people will have a relationship with this place. You feel like you get a unique, special bond with it. The castle resembles a storybook setting, but beneath that, there’s this forward-facing entrepreneurial family.’
It’s that mix of romance and rigour that has made Eastnor so vital to JLR. For decades, the fairytale landscape has doubled as the brand’s ultimate testing ground, where breakthroughs from coil-sprung suspension to terrain response to hill descent control were conceived of and put through their paces – and where today’s cutting-edge driver assistance systems continue to be trialled.
‘It’s amazing to me, as a local, that there’s a place over the hills that not many people know about, which is absolutely integral to Land Rover,’ says Dave. ‘Every car we’ve ever produced since 1962 has had to go through here to be tested before we send them off around the world. While our technologies and designs have evolved dramatically over the decades, Eastnor has remained a constant: a place where every product that carries Land Rover DNA is put through its paces before it ever reaches a customer.’
But Eastnor is more than an engineering ground. It is also a stage for cultural moments that give both brands their global allure. All new Defender, Discovery or Range Rover customers are invited here to explore the full capability of their new vehicles, as well as royalty, film stars, sporting heroes and other household names. Memorable encounters are etched into the very topography: King Hussein’s Bomb Hole, for instance, recalls the Jordanian monarch’s tussle with an unforgiving stretch of terrain (perhaps a tale for another time).
'One story that stands out for me is hosting a member of a Middle Eastern royal family,’ says Dave. ‘His grandfather had driven at Eastnor decades earlier, and that day, he drove a specially modified vehicle through the very terrain his grandfather once tackled. It wasn’t just a drive, it was a connection across generations, written into the very fabric of the estate.’
It is that emotional connection, layered over decades of shared history, that makes the partnership so powerful.
‘That’s the unique and special thing that other brands around the world can’t recreate,’ Dave reflects. ‘It’s the shared history. That’s what you can’t put a value on: Eastnor and JLR are two sides of the same coin. One provides the capability, the other the context. Together, they offer something no other luxury automotive brand can: a location where engineering excellence meets emotional connection.’
Land Rover may have been born elsewhere, but Eastnor is where its soul resides. ‘Eastnor is perhaps something even more grand than a spiritual home,’ Dave says with a smile. ‘How many luxury brands can genuinely claim to have a spiritual castle?’