CLICK Em Inn is probably the greatest name for a pub in the history of the county. It sounds like the sort of place where a policeman who was over-enthusiastic with the handcuffs would have had a stool reserved for him at the bar.

The inn is now a farm and, as devotees of the property section of the Advertiser, our sister paper, will have noticed, it is currently on the market.

But Click Em Inn Farm is doubly special because it is near Quebec (which is itself near Esh Winning if you're still having trouble pinning it down). Quebec is another great place name which derives from 1759 when its fields were enclosed.

In that year, Major-General James Wolfe sailed up the St Lawrence River into the heart of Canada with 49 men-of-war, 200 support vessels and about 9,000 men: it was the largest British naval contingent to cross the Atlantic and accounted for a quarter of the Royal Navy.

With such a huge force behind him, Wolfe knew he had to capture Quebec from the French. The chief navigator on the operation was one Captain James Cook who, in a few years time, would find fame - and more besides - in the Pacific Ocean.

But they found the city of Quebec sitting high on clifftops, all but impregnable. All the French commander, Marquis Louis Joseph de Montcalm de Saint-Veran, had to do was sit tight until winter came along and drove the invaders away.

The British tried desperately to entice the French into an open battle, on one day alone losing 443 men, but Montcalm wouldn't budge.

With winter fast approaching and the pressure of such large force telling, Wolfe took to his sickbed suffering nervous exhaustion. There he languished for ten days until he heard that a secret inlet had been discovered with a secret path leading up the cliffs to an under-defended sentry post.

On September 13, he ordered that the path be stormed and the sentries over-run. Within a couple of hours, and with minimal fuss, he was standing atop the Plains of Abraham overlooking Quebec.

The French had to come out and fight, and the battle was short, intense and bloody. The French commander was shot in the groin and died; Wolfe received a musket-ball to the wrist, a shell fragment to the abdomen and, finally, a bullet to the chest which punctured his lungs. He died having been told that the French were fleeing - but his victory was enough to have a small village in County Durham named after him.

Which brings us back to Click Em Inn Farm. Why? "It's a good question," says Ian Nattress, the vendor. "Two or three hundred years ago we believe it used to be an inn and cattle drovers rested here."

He says there's another Click Em Inn Farm at Ponteland near Newcastle Airport.

Victor Watts, master at Durham University's Grey College and author of the County Durham Dictionary of Place Names, goes one better. There's a Clickhimin on Shetland, he says, and he's been there.

"It's a broch," he says, "a Dark Age drystone fortification. Near Lerwick, I think. But I don't think anybody quite knows what it means but it sounds to me like somewhere where someone would count something like sheep."

Which would seem to tie in with Ian's drovers theory and so we can say that, in centuries past, Click Em Inn was a place where they counted 'em in.

STILL in the property section, we hear of a one-up one-down with a single storey kitchen extension near Darlington. It was bought for £43,000 two years ago and was sold last week for £72,000. Who says the housing market is slowing down?