BRAY MEMORIES

When it comes to equal size wheel four-wheel drive conversions, most people automatically think of the County big wheelers based on Ford tractors, or the similar Roadless machines. However, for me when I was growing up, it was a quite different type of 4wd tractor that caught my imagination and, if I’m honest, still does to this very day.

Influence

Growing up in a very rural part of northeast Suffolk I was surrounded, quite literally, by farming; arable and dairy farming being the two main types practised. Of the three closest farms to my parents’ house, one ran Ford tractors, the other Ford and Massey Ferguson, but the one closest, with a field only feet away from the back garden, was rather different. This farm ran Leyland tractors in the Seventies and early Eighties, and it was this farm that had the greatest influence on me growing up.

The farm in question, owned by the Collen family, comprised some 800