Sheepleas is a biological and geological Site of Special Scientific Interest east of Guildford in Surrey. It is a

Geological Conservation Review The Geological Conservation Review (GCR) is produced by the UK's Joint Nature Conservation Committee and is designed to identify those sites of national and international importance needed to show all the key scientific elements of the geological ...

site and a Local Nature Reserve. It is owned by

Surrey County Council Surrey County Council is the county council administering certain services in the non-metropolitan county of Surrey in England. The council is composed of 81 elected councillors, and in all but one election since 1965 the Conservative Party has ...

and managed by the Surrey Wildlife Trust.

History

The sheepleas was a long-standing area sheep grazing area ( lēah''' being an

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

term for

pasture Pasture (from the Latin ''pastus'', past participle of ''pascere'', "to feed") is land used for grazing. Pasture lands in the narrow sense are enclosed tracts of farmland, grazed by domesticated livestock, such as horses, cattle, sheep, or sw ...

). In 1915, it was included as one of 284 nature reserves on the Rothschild List. Part of the sheepleas

bought in 1936 and a further area in the 1950s.

Geography

This sloping site on the

North Downs The North Downs are a ridge of chalk hills in south east England that stretch from Farnham in Surrey to the White Cliffs of Dover in Kent. Much of the North Downs comprises two Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs): the Surrey Hills a ...

has woodland, scrub and botanically rich grassland. The diverse invertebrate fauna includes two nationally rare flies, '' Norellia spinipes'' and '' Microdon devius''. A cutting in Mountain Wood exposes a unique gravel

Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was finally confirmed in ...

deposit which throws light on the Quaternary history of the

Weald The Weald () is an area of South East England between the parallel chalk escarpments of the North and the South Downs. It crosses the counties of Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex and Kent. It has three separate parts: the sandstone "High Weald" in the ...

and the evolution of the

London Basin The London Basin is an elongated, roughly triangular sedimentary basin approximately long which underlies London and a large area of south east England, south eastern East Anglia and the adjacent North Sea. The basin formed as a result of compre ...

. The site is open to the public.

References

{{Local Nature Reserves in Surrey Local Nature Reserves in Surrey Surrey Wildlife Trust Sites of Special Scientific Interest in Surrey Geological Conservation Review sites Hills of Surrey