I had a really old one — a 1984 model in the US, before they were officially imported by Land Rover in 1988, so it was gray market.
There was a lot of expensive maintenance, and it wasn’t as pretty as the new ones, but it was a beast off-road. The Solex carb sucked, so I replaced it with a fuel injection system. It got crappy mileage. It could tow anything, and drove through weather like nothing else I’ve been in. Even though it was gray market, I never had trouble getting parts, though I did have a hard time finding shops that knew how to deal with it — a Big Tires place screwed up my brakes, for example.
I ended up turning it upside down because I was driving too fast on a dirt road in the middle of the night, and hit an unmarked turn. Turned it back over, drove it home, sawed the top off, drove it for a while longer till it threw a piston — apparently from being started after being upside down.