Today’s photograph is a little different from our usual Sunday fare which tends to focus on World War One or Two for the most part. Today though we have a nice image of a group of soldiers about to head out on a patrol from a base in Northern Ireland, probably in the 1990s:

The men are stood in front of a pair of up-armoured Land Rovers. These are Glover/Webb Armoured Patrol Vehicles. They are based around a strengthened Land Rover chassis and were introduced in 1986 at the same time as the RUC’s Tangi Land Rovers. They saw service until the mid 1990s when they were replaced with ‘Snatch’ Land Rovers:

About 100 of these vehicles were delivered to the British Army and they could hold six passengers and two crew. The men of the patrol are wearing a mixture of equipment, including several with Northern Ireland chest rigs and from the cap badges we can see they come from a number of regiments:

This is a large format photograph and I speculate it was taken by a regimental photographer and copies given to the men in the picture as a souvenir of their tour. Original photographs from Northern Ireland are hard to find and this one has some cracking details in it.