✉ Wyre Piddle is a small village in Worcestershire just upriver from Pershore. It really is called that.
✉ Wyre Piddle is a pleasant village, mostlylinear, squished between the river Avon on one side and the railway on the other. It's old enough to have been named in the Domesday Book, then called Pidele. It has a pub, a church and a population of about 600. It's neither of great consequence nor especially visitworthy, just nice. And it really is called that.
✉ It's called Wyre Piddle because it's on the Piddle Brook. The Piddle Brook rises near Inkberrow and flows for about 14 miles past Flyford Flavell, North Piddle and Naunton Beauchamp to join the River Avon at Wyre Piddle. Inkberrow is sometimes thought to be the inspiration for Ambridge in The Archers, in which case a better name for the fictional village might be Piddlebridge.
✉ The UK's greatest concentration of Piddles is in Dorset on the River Piddle. This flows through the villages of Piddletrenthide and Piddlehinton to join the River Frome near Wareham. It also flows through Puddletown, Tolpuddle, Affpuddle, Briantspuddle and Turners Puddle, all of which were originally piddles rather than puddles before 19th century prudes forced a name change.
✉ Piddle is thought to be a Saxon word for a small stream or tiny flow, although it's unclear whether the comparison with urination came before or after.
✉ This is what the Piddle Brook looked like at Wyre Piddle earlier in the week, although it's normally a lot lower than this. The bridge here was widened and reconstructed in 1930 but retained parts of the original structure because this has long been part of a main road between Worcester and Evesham.
✉ I arrived in Wyre Piddle an hour after the Environment Agency lowered their red flood warning (flooding is expected) to an amber flood alert (flooding is possible). Seems they were a bit premature because I had been intending to walk down Mill Lane to Pershore but the road was still underwater so I had to turn round and go back the way I came. This is why I ended up spending so much time in Wyre Piddle.
✉ This driver has just spotted the flooding at the top of Mill Lane and is thinking better of it. He was probably driving to the marina at Wyre Mill, a former watermill now occupied by a clubful of boating types. This is where Toyah Willcox used to come sailing at weekends with her parents, staying in a caravan by the marina.
✉ I'd love to have seen the mill again but the floodwater meant I never got anywhere close. I last boated past on a chilly Saturday morning in September 1984, negotiating the lock by the weir while several of my friends slept off their hangovers.
✉ The weir has been here for over 1000 years, indeed 'wyre' originally meant weir, hence Wyre Piddle means weir by the small stream and is thus absolutely nothing to laugh at.
✉ Wyre Piddle has some really lovely 15th century timber cottages, great hulking things with thatched roofs, whitened brick and dormer windows. Generally the oldest buildings face the river because that's where the action was, and the subsequent infill is across the road.
✉ The village has a lot of listed buildings, mostly strung out along the river with a cluster by the pub. Manor House is 17th century with an overhanging gable. Ivy Cottage's thatch looks a bit mossy at the moment.
✉ The Anchor Inn is a long low Georgian public house, once again offering traditional cuisine after kitchen problems last month. Alas it no longer serves pints of 'Piddle in The Hole', not since the Wyre Piddle brewery was dissolved in 2015. If the weather's fine you can drink outside on a rear terrace in the 'Piddle Beach Garden'.
✉ A foot ferry used to cross the Avon just alongside the pub, long since closed but there's still a lengthy pointless footpath on the opposite bank.
✉ You can't easily get to the river unless you own one of the houses backing onto it. The sole public access is at the far end of Church Street in Smith's Meadow, but on my visit the top half was full of dogs and the bottom half full of water so I gave it a miss.
✉ St Anne's church is Norman with an original chancel arch, medieval altar slab and replica font. You can feel how old and unaltered it is as you step inside, a simple stone nave with a cell-like altar space at the far end, just how most English churches used to be. SPAB very much approved. St Anne's is usually open from 10 til 4, which is considerably more often than it hosts services.
✉ It's been a very long time since Wyre Piddle had a shop and even longer since it had a Post Office. If you want groceries you need to walk half a mile up Wyre Hill (no footpath) to the service station by the roundabout which has an Asda Express, Starbucks and Greggs. That's a pretty good selection for a small village, but technically that village is Pinvin not Wyre Piddle because these are Pinvin Services.
✉ Regular events at the Village Hall include Puppy School (Monday), Tuesday & Coffee (Tuesday), Over 60s Keep Fit (Thursday) and Yoga (Friday). The Wyre Piddle WI meet monthly.
✉ The Preaching Cross at the village T-junction is "a good example of a medieval standing cross with a square stepped base", and is surmounted by a 19th century knob and iron cross head. Three spook-like metal bollards prevent careless drivers from accidentally demolishing the structure.
✉ If you're interested in road numbering, you've hit the jackpot with Wyre Piddle. It used to be on the B4084, the less important road between Evesham and Worcester, while the main A44 ran to the south of the Avon and crossed the river at Pershore. But the B4084 still funnelled a lot of traffic through the heart of Wyre Piddle, being more direct, which fair dampened village life. Thankfully a Wyre Piddle bypass opened in 2002, and proved so good they swapped the road numbers so that the B4084 now runs through Pershore and the A44 runs north of the river via the bypass.
✉ Lorries aiming for the Pershore Trading Estate still had to drive down Wyre Hill and enact a hairpin turn by Piddle Bridge, this V-shaped road renumbered the B4083. So in 2022 the council built an extra link road over the railway bypassing Wyre Piddle entirely, the old fork now mysteriously labelled A4538 instead.
✉ To stop traffic taking a shortcut through Wyre Piddle the council's had to add a barrier near the railway bridge which supposedly only lets through buses, cycles and emergency vehicles. It's made the entire village a dead end, which must be annoying for residents trying to drive to Evesham but hasn't stopped villagers getting their speedwatch cameras out and moaning anyway. Graphs of actual and average speeds are published monthly.
✉ Wyre Piddle used to have a station called Wyre Halt, opened in 1934, but Beeching culled it in 1966. Pershore station is just over a mile away but you really wouldn't to walk it after dark.
✉ 20 years ago Wyre Piddle had an hourly bus service to Pershore and Evesham but is now down to one circuitous timewaster a day allowing 90 minutes shopping time in Evesham, a service that's practically unusable.
✉ More people live on my London street than in Wyre Piddle and yet you'll find far more of a community feeling here, what with clubs and gatherings and Brian's Charity Quiz and the summer fete, not to mention Chocolate Bingo with a Fish And Chip Supper at the village hall next month. If you want a great social life, move to a village.
✉ Thank you for holding out to the end for a few more Piddle references. The monthly village newsletter is called Piddle Post. The monthly film night at the village hall is called Piddle Pics. And a few doors down is Wee Wee Cottage, official address Wee Wee Cottage, Wyre Piddle WR10 2HR, and what a laugh the owner must have had when they renamed it.
✉ Wyre Piddle is a small village in Worcestershire just upriver from Pershore. It really is called that.
