File:Snail-creep Hanging, Great Ridge near Chicklade - geograph.org.uk - 468077.jpg

English: Snail-creep Hanging, Great Ridge near Chicklade About halfway down the public footpath from the centre of Great Ridge woods down to Park Bottom, the path levels out along Longdean Bottom. On the right is a narrow coombe (a steep sided dry valley formed in freely draining chalk downland) that goes up to Snail-creep Hanging. This unusual name is used by Thomas Hardy in Under the Greenwood Tree: 'He [Dick]leaped over the gate, and pushed up the lane for nearly two miles, till a winding path called Snail-Creep sloped up a hill and entered a hazel copse by a hole like a rabbit's burrow'. This name may go back to the Middle Ages and may be so called not for the presence of snails but vernacular for a general sense of 'snailiness' that the area evoked. Much more recently, but of passing interest only, the land immediately to the north of Snail-creep Hanging, that is the valley in the picture, was the subject of an appeal in 2003 against the Countryside Agency who had declared it 'wholly or predominantly of mountain, moor, heath or down'. The appellant, the Fonthill Estate, the owners of Great Ridge, were successful in claiming that the site was within a large woodland which is the subject of a woodland grant scheme and was more than 50% covered in wood or scrub, and so presumably got their grant.