Volvo's V70 estate was already well-established and highly popular when, three years ago, someone at the company stood up and said, "Let's off-road!" And along came the V70 Cross Country - an out-and-out rural vehicle, with four-wheel drive and a thick metal rack on the roof to strap dead deer on to, and with the chunky look of those all-terrain vehicles which are so popular these days on the streets of, among other places, London. The Cross Country, now available in a revamped model, is essentially the V70 with lots of thick plastic cladding on it - in particular at the front end and around the wheels - so that you don't ruin your paint-job on the brambles, or, as may be, on the stray trolleys in the car park at your local Asda.

No matter what people actually end up using it for, this is a vehicle built to climb every mountain, ford every stream - and probably to follow every rainbow, if you've got the time and can afford the petrol. It clings tenaciously to Tarmac, clay and riverbed alike. It perches 20cms off the ground, which ought to give the rabbits a sporting chance, and there's an aluminium plate bolted to the car's underside to prevent gravel, bull-rushes, voles etc from gumming up the engine.

Test driving a spanking new clean model, with the whiff of freshly stitched leather in one's nostrils, seemed a somehow false or irrelevant experience - although a high percentage of the V70 XC's putative owners will, one imagines, keep the car neatly valeted and only go near gravel when it crops up on someone's drive. Clearly, though, the car's design insists that the wheel arches should be permanently stucco'd with mud spray. The interior should smell of wet dog and Wellington. And every time you turn a corner there should be an almighty clatter as various bridles, shooting sticks, discarded Puffa jackets, and maybe the occasional Young Farmer in a drunken stupor, slew from one side of the boot to the other.

The boot, incidentally, is large enough to serve as a stable. Indeed, I calculate you could get a full-grown horse and two foals in there, albeit lying down and with one of the foals on top of the other. Alternatively, you can collapse the back seats and give the second foal all the space it wants. The V70 pictures a life exorbitantly stuffed with children, animals and skis, and then, big-heartedly, caters to it. (Which makes it, incidentally, very difficult to reverse into small spaces.)

And yet it still goes very fast. I wasn't expecting what is, in effect, an elongated horsebox, to steam away so quietly and effortlessly. But I was forgetting that this is, of course, a turbo-charged, 2.4 litre, elongated horsebox, capable of beating almost anything its own size to the first jump. And, because Volvo think of everything, it has immaculately swift and unterrifying brakes as well, so you can steady yourself when the first jump looms unexpectedly fast.

Thanks to some assiduous image cultivation, the word everyone directly associates with Volvo is "safety". Since the 70s it's what this famous Swedish company has been most famous and Swedish for, apart from selling fewer records than Abba. Volvo, we warmly agree, make a "safe" car. Of course, there can be no genuinely "safe car" in the absence of genuinely "safe drivers", and what is really meant by "safety" in this context is, more realistically, "protection" or "idiot-proofing" - slightly less seductive aspects from a marketing point of view, but appealing in their own way.

Partly because of the received wisdom, but also because of the vehicle's patently obvious solidity, there is something uniquely reassuring about sitting at the wheel of a Volvo. You feel quietly confident that you are piloting the finest padded cell that Swedish research can come up with - a car with air-bags and anti-crumple zones in places you didn't know cars had places. In the V70, you feel strangely - perhaps even dangerously, which would be ironic - impervious. Pretty much whatever you hit in this car, you imagine, be it pothole or cattle, is going to come off worse than you do.

Of course, what you're likely to hit depends upon where you drive and here Volvo and the marketplace do seem to be interestingly at cross purposes. The V70 XC is a car built to be up to its axles in slurry, but is just as likely to end up at ease on its tyres in Surrey. Its smoothness and peacefulness are a major corrective for anyone who thought all-terrain driving was about the thrill of feeling the uneven road beneath your feet and the underside of the roof on your head. Has the off-roader ever been so thoroughly pampered - so lavishly furnished with pop-out drinks holders and ticket clips and coin cubby-holes and directional air-conditioning nozzles (even for your passengers in the rear)? The driver's seat is electronically adjustable to fit the individual contours of your backside, and I don't think I have felt more comfortable in a car. I didn't set one off to find out, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the airbags were padded with goose down.

Then again, maybe Volvo have simply been smart enough to spot how, for the motorist, the gap between country and city is closing - and canny enough to pitch a car neatly into what remains of the divide. Even in urban areas, the spread of traffic-calming devices makes driving any distance at all a kind of off-road experience and calls out for vehicles with big clearances and high-performance suspensions. How else are you to maintain a steady 55 through those humps and chicanes? Hell, these days, wherever you are, it's a jungle out there. The V70 Cross Country is your machete.

The lowdown

Volvo V70 XC

Price: from £28,910

Maximum speed: 130mph

Acceleration: 0-62 in 8.6 seconds

Consumption: 26.9 mpg (combined)

At the wheel: John Craven

On the stereo: Clannad

En route for: Iceland (the shop)