A FORTNIGHT ago, Looking Back was pondering pubs named after old racehorses.

We began with the Revellers’ Inn, which stood in Yafforth, near Northallerton, for 200 years until it closed in 1992, and was named after the Reveller which won the St Leger in 1818.

Reveller was a local favourite which raced regularly at Northallerton racecourse, where County Hall is today.

The Beeswing at East Cowton is named after the horse which won the Northallerton Gold Cup twice in the 1830s, and then there was the Non Plus at Morton-le-Swale, which won the St Leger in 1827. We also noted the Tickle Toby in Northallerton, a well known local horse from the same era.

Several readers kindly drew our attention to the Voltigeur pub in Spennymoor, which is named after a horse owned by Lord Zetland of Aske Hall, near Richmond, which won both the Derby and the St Leger in 1850.

Andy Groome emailed: “You can add The Little Wonder to your list. It used to be at the junction of the Skipton and Ripon roads in Harrogate, and was named after the 1840 Derby winner. Unfortunately it has been demolished.”

The Little Wonder was from Westmoreland, and there were concerns about whether it might have been two horses passed off as one. It didn’t look like a winner on its previous outings and started the Epsom Derby as a 50-1 outsider, but it finished streets ahead and yet never won again. Little Wonder they doubted The Little Wonder.

Lots of people mentioned The Red Alligator in South Church, near Bishop Auckland, which bears the name of Denys Smith’s 1968 Grand National winner.

And then there was an intriguing query from Libby Harding in Leeming about The Crosby in Thornton le Beans, near Northallerton. Was it named after Crosby Don, she wondered?

Crosby Don was bred in 1960, and was owner by Don Raper, the chairman of Barkers store until he died in 2007, aged 86. In fact, Crosby Don was said to be the favourite horse of his long turf career, as it won 14 races, including an important handicap at Doncaster.

But Crosby is the area surrounding Thornton le Beans – a “crosby” is a settlement named after its stone crosses – so both the pub and the horse were named after the place.

However, Libby is not the first person to ask how Crosby Don got its name. When it won its big race at Doncaster, Bing Crosby is said to have got in touch with Mr Raper and asked the same question.

THIS leads us on to the derivation of the name “Thornton le Beans”, a village which locals still know as “Beantown”.

There are lots of thorntons across Yorkshire, all settlements that grew up near a thorn bush. Differentiating one thornton from another was a thorny problem, so many of them added adjectives. Thornton Watlass, near Bedale, was waterless, whereas nearby Thornton Steward was owned by the steward of the Earl of Richmond.

In the 16th Century, it was fashionable for villages to add French mystique to their names, and so Thornton le Moor came about because it was on a moor, and Thornton le Street because it was on a Roman road.

Beantown, though, was a little different. In the 8th Century, it had been called Thornton-in-Vivario, which is a Latin word, “vivarium” that refers to a “place of life”, like a fishpond or a game enclosure. Then in the Domesday Book of 1085, it was called Griss Thornton, and “Griss”, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Place Names, is an Old Norse nickname meaning “pig”.

Very few people would want to live at a place called Thornton-le-Pig, so the villagers looked in their fields named themselves after the beans growing there – only they went with Thornton-in-Fabis, as “faba” is the Latin word for “bean”. That, though, must have sounded too old-fashioned when their neighbours starting using trendy French words, and so they became Thornton-le-Bean.