Ah, the genteel times of yore. Many readers with an interest in those trundling, shoogling, self-propelled boxes on wheels commonly known as cars will no doubt remember the formative years of Top Gear on the tele. Those of you of a more redoubtable vintage may even have fond memories of the show’s primitive forerunner, Ye Illustrated Hand Cranked Courant, which provided a valuable insight into the cut-and-thrust of the automotive industry with its delicately quilled etchings of stovepipe hat-wearing gentlemen twirling their moustaches and pondering the rigorous endeavour associated with birling an engine towards a spluttering start. It was an exhausting process that can still be glimpsed to this day as your correspondent attempts to wind up The Herald’s editorial pool car.

In its most recent incarnation, of course, Top Gear was a blokey, back-slapping exercise in high-octane, foot-to-the-floor indulgence. Curse those ancient Mesopotamians eh? One grave consequence they didn’t foresee when they invented the wheel was that the modern world would be subjected to the plague of Jeremy Clarkson.

For many a year, though, Top Gear avoided all this explosive, roaring razzmatazz and was more like a languid, 30 minute leaf through a Haynes Manual as the erudite William Woollard delivered an earnest and in-depth piece-to-camera on piston rings, flywheels and carburettors while standing with one foot resting on the bumper of a Talbot Sunbeam that had its bonnet open. In tribute to the debonair Wullie, countless car devotees would adopt a similar pose while photographing themselves in a craze that became universally known as ‘Woollarding’. The result? Many a vulnerable groin was strained while trying to cock a leg onto the fender of an Austin Allegro in a futile attempt to emulate Woollard’s chivalrous air of motoring authority. You needed a torque wrench to get the leg back down again.

Of course, Woollard will be forever cherished by motorsport enthusiasts as the host of the BBC’s Rally Report, that nightly bullet-in during the Lombard RAC Rally that was as essential as it was spontaneous. If he wasn’t breaking the news from the front that there had been high drama at the Opel Manta service halt in Chepstow then he was informing a bleary-eened nation that Juha Kankkunen had cracked his prop shaft in the Forest of Dean. Funnily enough, this scribe suffered a similarly excruciating fate when attempting one of those ‘Woollarding’ postures on a Triumph Dolomite without warming up. Or so it felt like. Fling in the intrepid Tony Mason interviewing drivers through filthy, wound down windows as they pulled into a parc ferme after a torrid stage in Grizedale and you had all the bases covered.

Next week, the 2017 World Rally Championship will rev itself to a resumption in Monte Carlo but, for this scribbler at least, it still doesn’t capture the imagination quite like nostalgic images of a Metro 6R4 thundering through Kielder Forest or Woollard painting a picture of a thudding confrontation between car and tree by blithely suggesting that “Walter Rohrl’s Audi Quattro could now be had for a very low price indeed.”

In its pomp, the Lombard RAC Rally – now known as the Wales Rally of Great Britain on the WRC circuit – was a career around a variety of British nooks and crannies. In the tumultuous Group B era of the early-to-mid 1980s, when that aforementioned Mini Metro was as powerful and as lethal as a hydrogen bomb, the sight of magical motoring monsters filing through my home town of Langholm as an eight or nine-year-old en route to a series of stages in the woods of nearby Castle O’er was all rather enchanting. “Look, there’s Tony Pond in his Mighty Metro,” you’d point. “Crikey, ah thought that was me Granny delivering the flooers ta the Floral Art Club,” came the jaw-dropping response. Following said beasts into such thunderous territory in the dark of a November’s morning was even more enthralling. And this is into the forest we’re talking about, not the Floral Art Club. Clambering up bankings, slootering about in the winter squalor, the sound of a marshal’s whistle increasing the heart rate? Rally fans still possess that same sense of sturdy resolve that used to be the reserve of the ancient mariner. The sight of eye-popping headlights, and the sound of something very quick hurtling towards you, was a bit like the sensation a moth must get before it’s splattered by the alluring, yet deadly embrace of a full halogen beam at 90 mph. “I think it should be one of those events with the same status as the Boat Race or the Derby, a really special, nationwide event that everybody gets involved in,” suggested Woollard.

For those converted and captivated by Rally Report’s nightly dispatches, Woollard will always be a national treasure.