A UNIQUE restoration project will see Land Rover celebrate its 70th anniversary year throughout 2018 with its original launch Land Rover.

The first Land Rovers were shown at the 1948 Amsterdam Motor Show and this original launch vehicle (pictured) has been posted missing for the last 63 years.

Discovered in a Welsh garden in 2017, Land Rover think it is the world’s most historically significant unrestored Land Rover

Even now, experts at Jaguar Land Rover Classic Works, in Coventry, are preserving the famous vehicle which was one of three pre-production Land Rovers shown at the Amsterdam show.

For years the whereabouts of this launch Land Rover was a mystery. The demonstration vehicle from Amsterdam was last on the road in the 1960s, after which it spent 20 years in a Welsh field before being bought as a restoration project.

Tim Hannig, Jaguar Land Rover Classic's director, said: “This Land Rover is an irreplaceable piece of world automotive history and is as historically important as ‘Huey’, the first pre-production Land Rover."

This vehicle had a lot of special features that were unique to the 48 pre-production Land Rovers produced prior to the mass production vehicles, such as thicker aluminium alloy body panels, a galvanised chassis and a removable rear tub.