LOTUS EVORA DRIVE

The Evora is bowing out but there’s a timeless quality to its Lotus DNA that delights – and always will. Steve Cropley takes it for a final fling

PHOTOGRAPHY MAX EDLESTON

It seemed a logical destination, just as it has surely done for Lotus lovers over many decades. I suppose if there’d been somewhere in the country called the Evora Valley we’d have headed there, but for the lack of such a place we chose the roads to and through the Elan Valley, central Wales, as the best place to savour the largest of the three outgoing Lotus E-models, the Evora, as it leaves production.

True, the name of this magnificent Welsh location never had any real connection with Lotus’s Elan: even the word itself is pronounced differently in central Powys than in Norfolk (the emphasis being on the first of its two syllables, not the second). Yet partly because of that mellif luous name, and even more because of the near-perfect driving roads that criss-cross the region, it seemed the place to go, both ideally and logically.

On Lotus pilgrimages I’ve made here in the past, the town of Rhayader has also been an important piece of the story. It’s in the epicentre of Wales, where the all-important, south-to-north A470 intersects traffic brought westwards by the equally busy A44. Rhayader bills itself as a kind of traveller’s rest, a place with a certain pioneering spirit, to which the humdrum aspects of ordinary life to the south and east don’t quite stretch. Call me sentimental, but I’ve always swallowed this whole, and associated this place with the continuing freedom of the road.

The first part of today’s mission was to meet photographer Max Edleston at 9am a few miles south-west of Rhayader on the B4518, close to the mighty dam across the magnificent Caban Coch reservoir, labelled in the guidebooks as ‘the reservoir of Wales’. This entailed a 100-mile journey from my home in the Cotswolds, predicted on Google Maps to take at least two and a half hours, so it was pitch black when I left home at six.