LAST Friday, there was plenty of time to muse on the meanings of the dun cow.

President George Bush, you will remember, was dining on fish and chips with Tony Blair at the Dun Cow pub in Sedgefield.

It's a crammed pub, low beams and tight tables, where you have wriggle politely to escape to the toilet.

The American press contingent, though, observed no such niceties. They brutally cast their British colleagues aside, elbowing them to the floor whenever the president made a move.

After a couple of minutes, the British slunk bloodied from the pub, and sat beneath the sign of the dun cow to nurse their injuries.

Pub signs, and names, largely evolved when the majority of people were illiterate. A few were religious names - the Cross Keys was the emblem of St Peter, the Star was the star of Bethlehem, the Bull was a Papal edict, and the Turk's Head became popular during the 12th century crusades - but most were simply easily-recognisable adverts.

If you spotted a picture of a bright red lion, you knew you were at the Red Lion. A chap with a crown on his head, you were at the King's Head. And so we have the Golden Cock, the Three Crowns, the Black Bull...

But not the Dun Cow. In English pub lore, there are two dun cows: one in the Black Country, the other in Durham.

Once-upon-a-time in Shropshire, a giant owned a giant cow whose supply of milk was inexhaustible. Until, that is, the day when a woman filled up her pail then tried to fill up her sieve. Understandably, the cow was enraged. She became "a monstrous wyld and cruell beast" and rushed about terrorising people.

Nearby lived Guy of Warwick who needed to prove his gallantry to win the hand of his belovd Felice. He slayed the dun cow on Dunsmore Heath, and Felice fell in love with him.

And so there are plenty of Dun Cows around Birmingham.

But Durham's is a very different dun cow, and there are at least nine pubs which bear its sign.

St Cuthbert died in 687 and was buried on Lindisfarne off the Northumbria coast. In 875, Viking raids forced his monks to flee the island, carrying the body with them.

On a hill near Hetton, the carriage carrying Cuthbert's coffin became stuck fast in mud. The monks couldn't shift it, so they resorted to a day of prayer. Cuthbert appeared to a monk in a vision and told him the coffin should go to "dun holm".

But the monks did not know where "dun holm" was, although they probably knew that it meant "hill island". So they wandered around until they overheard a conversation between two milkmaids.

"Oh, I have lost my dun cow," lamented one maid.

"But I have seen her," said the second, "roaming near Dun Holm."

The monks followed the milkmaid to Dun Holm, the hill island surrounded by the River Wear. There they began to build what we now know as Durham Cathedral.

In one version of the story, the cathedral became a tourist trap, so the monks slaughtered the dun cow and set up a burger bar to appeal to the American market.