Large, rolling and, more often than not, green and mud-splattered, the Land Rover Discovery is widely deemed to be as close as the motor industry has come to embodying Gloucestershire in four-wheeled form. It doesn’t actually come with Camilla Parker Bowles and a pair of black labradors fitted as standard, but it would seem entirely unsurprising if it did.

That said, recent versions of this monumental piece of rural engineering have evolved considerably from the old farmers’ buckets of yore, with their weirdly tall back-ends and strangely tubular roof lights. The newer Discoveries pick up glitzy manners from the car’s sister vehicle, the Range Rover, which long ago stopped being exclusively a countryman’s gun carriage in favour of appealing to professional footballers.

Thus, on the new Discovery 4, observe the redrawn, diamante-effect grille, which winks knowlingly at the wrap-around smoked “privacy” glass (to protect the anonymity of your black labrador, presumably) and the wanton bling of the chrome-encrusted side air-intakes. With these touches, Land Rover seems to be moving slowly towards the creation of a unique place where the Duke of Edinburgh can happily meet Ashley Cole. And yet the Discovery remains substantially and stubbornly rural. There may be some urban takers who have mistaken the car for an armoured shopping-and-dropping machine, but its bulk and brilliance constantly betray it as the genuine off-road article. Even now, if you own a Discovery it’s because you have places to go, people to see and sick sheep to haul off fog-enshrouded moors.

There’s a sizeable clue in the “terrain response dial” (now repositioned at the foot of the dash panel, rather than behind the handbrake, where nobody ever noticed it). At a click, your Discovery is adapted to the prevailing conditions. The settings are mud, ice, sand, tropical rainstorm and meteorite shower. OK, not the last two. But the point is that this car will go pretty much anywhere that isn’t entirely vertical. It will climb every mountain, ford every stream. It will also follow every rainbow until you find your dream. Or your money back.

And if that dial isn’t enough of a tip about the kind of vehicle you’re in, see the bomb-proof, fold-down tailgate. Designed to double as a seat or viewing platform, it has clearly been constructed to bear the weight of two young farmers at a point-to-point race meeting.

Can you have too many surveillance cameras on a car? Land Rover doesn’t think so. The Discovery 4 has five — two on the front, one at the back and one on the underside of each wing-mirror, offering an exclusive view of the gutter to your left or road markings to your right. This information could be hugely reassuring if you happen to be towing a horse box or in a field with an angry bull, which, as an active, outdoorsy Discovery owner, you almost certainly will be.

The cameras render all manoeuvres in what is, let’s face it, a gigantic car, startlingly stress-free. I’m not suggesting for a minute that this system makes it technically impossible to back into or over anything in a Discovery. But I am suggesting that you have fewer excuses for doing so. Or say you’re swinging along a lane near Abbott’s Bottom, or wherever, and you become dimly aware that one of your young farmers has fallen off the tailgate. All you need do is press the touch-screen control and look back along the road without straining to turn your neck. Genius. (Note for urban-only users: by driving with the front camera switched on, you can convert your journey into a cheaply shot Ultravox video. Or you can split the screen and show all the camera angles at once, which is like being in your own private episode of 24.) The ride is entirely smooth, the steering has been improved and the new V6 turbodiesel engine is gutsy and yields better consumption than the outgoing model, offering some savings to set against your stonking £405 tax disc.

Meanwhile, the famous Land Rover “command driving position” continues to be exactly that — a position of amazing superiority over the road and your fellow road-users. Did you know that, on a clear day, from the summit of the driver’s seat in a Discovery, you can see at least three members of the Royal Family at the same time?

Land Rover Discovery 4 3.0 TDV6

Price £47,695

Top speed 112 mph

Acceleration 0-60 in 9 seconds

Average consumption 30.4 mpg

CO2 emissions 244 g/km