RICH AND FILTHY; Learning to off-road the Land Rover way.(Revs)(Column)

Byline: WILLIAM JEANES

We're forever telling you about driving schools, most of which are designed to give their students a hint of what high-performance driving and competition are all about. Land Rover Driving Schools, with which you may not be familiar, take a radically different approach to the art of driving.

Chief among the differences is Land Rover's wise decision to avoid hot, treeless racetracks in favor of delivering its instruction off the pavement, usually in the bosky deep woods far from the noisy wasteland of paved roads.

Another difference relates to the average income of most Land Rover owners, which in most instances requires six figures to quantify. In more than a few cases, it takes seven. Recognizing that its owner body prefers cuisine to food and wardrobe to clothes, Land Rover management has established its schools at hotels that maintain standards well beyond those you encounter at Motel 6. These include The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia; and the Biltmore Estate near Asheville, North Carolina. Internationalists may partake of the schools at the Fairmont Le Chateau Montebello in Quebec's Laurentian Mountains or at what's considered Land Rover's spiritual home, Eastnor Castle in the ...