THIS week, I've been to "Beantown" where I found the ladies of the Women Institute to be full of beans.

Beantown should not be confused with Beanotown, the place where Dennis the Menace and the Bash Street Kids lived in my favourite boyhood magazine, but in Beantown there were still plenty of comic moments as the ladies debated how many portions of fish and chips they should order in for their November agm.

"We'll say roughly between 28 and 30," concluded someone on top table, with a very precise guesstimate.

Beantown is the nickname of the intriguingly-named Thornton le Beans. It is a couple of miles south of Northallerton, and is near Thornton le Moor and just down the road from Thornton le Street.

There are lots of thorntons across Yorkshire, all settlements that grew up near a thorn bush. This created a thorny problem of how to differentiate one thornton from another, so many of them added further descriptive words. 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 seems to have been fashionable among villages to add an air of 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 was a little different, because in the Domesday Book of 1085 it is called Gristorentun. This means the thornton belonging to Griss, and Griss, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Place Names, is an Old Norse nickname which means “pig”.

Very few people would want to live at a place called Thornton-le-Pig, so over the centuries villagers sought a more salubrious name. In the 8th Century, they called themselves Thornton-in-Vivario, which is a Latin word, “vivarium” that refers to a “place of life”, like a fishpond or a game enclosure.

More centuries went by. New generations of villagers must have wondered what a vivarium was, and so looked for something new. What is our village known for, they pondered, and the answer was growing in the fields. So in the 16th Century, they started calling themselves Thornton-in-Fabis – the Latin word for “bean” is “faba”, but that must have sounded too old-fashioned when their neighbours starting using trendy French words, and so they became Thornton-le-Bean.

But this is a village of not one but two intriguing words. The ladies of the WI pointed me to their Wesleyan Methodist Chapel where the stone carved over the door tells how it was built in 1820 and then rebuilt in 1863. But, they said, look at it carefully...

So once my talk was over and I’d finished their homemade ginger biscuits, I went out into the star-splattered night and peered up at the stone. The torch on my phone picked out the dates 1820 and 1863, both correct.

But then I spotted:“Weslean”.

Newspapers are often not free from mistakes, so I sympathised with the mason. The people of Beantown, though, are so proud of their literal that they embroidered it into their millennial tapestry which hangs inside the chapel.

In fact, they couldn’t give a hill of beans about it.