P is for puddle
What do Sir Walter Raleigh and Peppa Pig have in common? Puddles, the wonderful freshwater habitat, featured in Country Life, 20 November 2024.
Dogs dip in them, birds bathe in them, children like to splash and stomp in their shallow waters. Puddles bring pleasure to some, but for others they are a soggy impediment to be dodged. Elizabeth I was fortunate to have Sir Walter Raleigh to smooth the plashy way for her when he famously (but apocryphally) laid his cloak over a muddy pool of rainwater.
Other royals have had less luck with puddles. The nursery rhyme’s Dr Foster, stepping in one right up to his middle, is said to be Edward I, who got wet falling off his horse on his way to Gloucester and refused ever to visit it again. The 13th century watercourse in question was probably a piddle, the old word for a stream, and referred to the River Severn which runs through the city. This certainly makes more rhyming sense – the word puddle seems to have been substituted in Victorian times.
Piddles and puddles sound comic, and being shallow, lend themselves easily to nursery- naming. Thus we have Beatrix Potter’s hapless Jemima Puddle-Duck, who allowed herself to be foolishly flattered by a foxy gentleman into collecting the sage and onion ingredients for a roast duck stuffing.
There is something joyful about a puddle, perhaps because it takes us back to our childhood. The lower-case poet ee cummings captures this spirit when he writes that the world is ‘puddle-wonderful’ in spring, while the children’s cartoon heroine Peppa Pig loves puddles so much that her image is featured on several brands of junior wellington boots. The very first episode of the pink piglet’s long-running cartoon series, broadcast in 2004, was Muddy Puddles.
However, one expert says we should take puddles seriously. Professor Jeremy Biggs is CEO of the Freshwater Habitats Trust and co-author of a book called Ponds, Pools and Puddles, published earlier this year:
‘Small waterbodies such as puddles and pools have traditionally been undervalued and overlooked, but collectively they are now known to support a wider variety of plant and animal species – including more rare species – than larger freshwaters such as rivers and lakes.’
Puddles can be important ecosystems, supporting some of our rarest and most endangered water plants, such as pillwort (Pilularia globulifera), tassel stonewort (Tolypella intricate), three-lobed crowfoot (Ranunculus tripartitus) and lesser water-plantain (Baldellia ranunculoides).
‘Common frogs (Rana temporaria), and smooth and palmate newts (Lissotriton vulgaris and L. helveticus) are happy to breed in quite tiny pools,’ says Professor Biggs. ‘So in spring you might puddles containing spawn or tadpoles and if you’re lucky and diligent you might also find different kinds of water beetles.’
He adds that puddles that are deeper than about 15cm and which last for more than a couple of months can support almost everything that lives in freshwater except for large fish.
Sometimes these mini habitats are created by human activity. A study of forestry vehicle-created puddles in Dorset turned up no fewer than 174 different groups of organisms. Flies (Diptera) and beetles (Coleoptera) contributed over half of the total, the rest being craneflies, (Tilupa) gnats, (Nematocera) water fleas (Daphnia pulex) and tiny crustaceans. Wet tracks left by army tanks on Salisbury Plain are known to be important habitats for fairy shrimp, Chirocephalus diaphanus. These are rather beautiful translucent creatures that can grow up to three centimetres long, and have been called living fossils. Similar forms dating back over 140 million years have been found in the fossil records.
Some plants thrive on occasional disturbance, and these find a perfect home in a puddle-strewn place. When temporary pools that had formed on ancient trackways on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall were deliberately disturbed to stir up the seedbank, they were found to contain specialist plants such as the pygmy rush (Juncus pygmaeus) and yellow centaury Cicendia filiformis).
Birds also benefit from puddles. House martins (Delichon urbicum) and swallows (Hirundo rustica) scoop nest-building materials from their muddy edges, while a hungry blackbird (Turdus merula) may find a welcome meal in earthworms that have surfaced in puddles after heavy rain.
A clean shallow puddle makes a safe drinking place for wild mammals, and many domestic dogs find it hard to resist a quick roll or lick of water as they pass. Poodles, incidentally, originally bred to retrieve waterfowl, are named after the German word to splash about.
For creative humans, puddles have offered metaphors and inspiration ever since Narcissus fell in love with his own refection in a pool of water. The poet Siegfried Sassoon’s Old Huntsman finds thatthe glint of stars in a frozen puddle makes him feel especially lonely, while Virginia Woolf twice writes about puddles as insurmountable obstacles: ‘for no reason I could discover, everything suddenly became unreal; I was suspended; I could not step across…’ Hitchhiker’s Guide author Douglas Adams uses puddles warming in the sun as an analogy for our tendency to think the world was made to have us in it – until we realise that it is gradually shrinking away.
Artists are drawn to puddles. John Constable wrote of his fascination with the sky as a source of light in nature, and in his 1820 Hampstead Heath, the heavens are reflected in puddles dotted around the heath after heavy rain. The playful illusionist Maurits Cornelis Escher’s 1952 woodcut Puddle highlights two perspectives at once in a puddle created by footprints and tyre tracks, making it hard to work out whether the trees central to the image are seen as a reflection, or through an opening. An image of a man leaping over a puddle – Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1932 Behind the Gare Saint Lazare – was the first to be described as capturing the ‘decisive moment’ in photography: moving objects caught in perfect composition.
Whatever your perspective on puddles, Jeremy Biggs urges everyone to get out and have a fresh look: ‘With a kitchen sieve and white tray, it’s amazing what you can find in the smallest waterbodies.’ It sounds like a splendid way of entertaining young wellie-wearing puddle-lovers.
But whatever you do, don’t be called a puddle drinker. That’s the term for someone so mean they would rather drink from a puddle than pay for a clean glass of water.
What is a puddle?
The word ‘puddle’ has a clear resonance for us all, probably because they’re such a regular feature of daily life, but there isn’t an agreed definition, according to freshwater expert Professor Jeremy Biggs. He describes them as ‘tiny waterbodies, usually shallow enough to splash in, almost certainly rain-filled, and definitely ephemeral, drying up in hours, days or weeks.’
Although they come and go, puddles tend to reappear in the same place.
A puddle only becomes a pond above a certain size and degree of persistence. Ponds have been defined by the Freshwater Habitats Trust as a body of water, usually fresh, but occasionally brackish, varying in size between one square metre and two hectares, which holds water for four months of the year or more.
So, if a waterbody is temporary and under a metre squared, it’s a puddle.
A pothole is a particular type of puddle on a road surface, created by wear or sinking. Early potters looking for a cheap source of materials would dig into ruts made by cartwheels to reach the clay deposits underneath. Carters and coach drivers, knowing who caused these indentations, called them potholes.
Puddles and Piddles
Several places in England are named after puddles – or at least appear to be. Puddletown in Dorset was once Piddletown, named after the river Piddle which runs through it. The villages of Affpuddle, Briantspuddle and Turners Puddle have the same origin, while others along the river such as Piddlehinton and Piddletrenthide have kept the ‘i’. The Tolpuddle Martyrs might have had a different ring if the original vowel was kept.
Piddle comes from an Old English word for a stream draining from a marsh.
Puddle Dock in Blackfriars, London, is the site of a wharf that was filled in during the 1950s following Blitz damage. It is shown on 16th century maps as a place used for watering horses who ‘with their trampeling made puddle’ according to Stow’s Survey of London in 1603. It later became a laystall – a place where cattle were kept before going to market – and by the 18th century was used as a place to dump night soil (human excrement).
There are villages named Puddledock in Norfolk and Kent.
Image: Francesca Dunn, Freshwater Habitats Trust