MIKE BAGSHAW, travel and countryside writer lifts the lid on the lowly snail.

Late summer is a time of plenty for half of the animal kingdom. Ant colonies are full to bursting point, which they eventually do, in a cloud of winged queens and males, small pools and water butts are seething with the larvae of midges and mosquitoes and tiny spiderlings seem to be everywhere.

This excess is welcomed by entomologists, arachnophiles and hungry birds, but vegetable growers are often less impressed. We, for instance, have been forced to harvest all our cabbages and cauliflowers early this year, before they disappear into the bellies of the thousands of cabbage white caterpillars in our garden.

Top of the many horticulturalists hate lists, has to be slugs and snails. I thought we had more than our fair share until I visited a wood in West Heslerton recently and was staggered at the quantity of snails living there. It wasn’t just the numbers that were notable, but also the variety of different species on show, a cursory identity parade revealing banded snails (both white and brown-lipped varieties), disc snails, pillar snails, hairy snails and, of course, our old friend the garden snail.

Surprisingly, how common snails are in a particular area is not dependent on food supply – well it sort of is and sort of isn’t. Most snails will eat any old dead and decaying plant material, compost, woodland leaf litter and the like, but they need a particular mineral in it to thrive.

A snail’s shell is made from calcium carbonate, so they need lots of it in their diet. Consequently, they are much happier in places with limey soil, like West Heslerton’s on the chalk Wolds, or much of northern Ryedale on the limestone Tabular Hills. The bedrock beneath my North York Moors garden is sandstone, poor in calcium and therefore not so good for snails. Before you get too jealous, remember that slugs have no shell, so don’t need so much calcium, hence my garden is as full of slugs as anyones.

Despite the exotic variety of gastropods in West Heslerton, there was very little activity to see. Our very dry weather in the past few weeks has caused snails to go into a temporary state of aestivation – basically sealing themselves into their shell and finding a cool, damp place to wait for rain, often in large groups.

Now, some readers may have got to this point and thought, “Wow, snails are quite interesting after all,” but I know that in reality most of you will just be saying, “That’s all well and good, but how can I get rid of them from my garden?” My advice would be to collect them and either put them in your compost bin to speed up the process or, brace yourself, eat them.

This is not as outlandish as it might seem. Our garden snail was originally a Mediterranean species, probably brought here by the Romans to supplement their diet and there is a tradition of eating them in the West Country where they are known locally as Mendip wallfish. Back in the 1960s the Miners’ Arms, a pub in Priddy, Somerset, famously served its own recipe of wallfish cooked in cider and herb butter.

If you are feeling bold enough to try some Ryedale wallfish then just search online for “eating garden snails uk”; you will be amazed what is out there and will get good advice on preparation and recipes.