  We investigate the snaking of localised patterns, seen in numerous physical
applications, using a variational approximation. This method naturally
introduces the exponentially small terms responsible for the snaking structure,
that are not accessible via standard multiple-scales asymptotic techniques. We
obtain the symmetric snaking solutions and the asymmetric 'ladder' states, and
also predict the stability of the localised states. The resulting approximate
formulas for the width of the snaking region show good agreement with numerical
results.
