River Piddle

The River Piddle or Trent or North River is a small rural Dorset river which rises next to Alton Pancras church (Alton Pancras was originally named Awultune, a Saxon name meaning the village at the source of a river) and flows south and then south-easterly more or less parallel with its bigger neighbour, the River Frome, to Wareham, where they both enter Poole Harbour via Wareham Channel.

Many of the villages it passes through are named after it: Puddletown, Tolpuddle, Piddlehinton, Piddletrenthide, Affpuddle, Briantspuddle, Turnerspuddle. All but two of those names now contain "puddle" rather than "piddle"; a local tradition tells that the villages were renamed to avoid embarrassment before a visit by Queen Victoria. However, there is no firm evidence of this and Puddletown was certainly still called Piddletown into the 1950s.