Everyone accepts that Shepherd’s Pie gets made without mincing up real shepherds; similarly Cottage Pie doesn’t have bricks and thatch in it. We take these dishes into our diet without another thought but once, there must have been a difference between them. In today’s cook books they both seem to consist of mincemeat, topped with mashed potatoes, finally browned in the oven. I puzzled for a long while trying to work out why one dish should apparently have two names and the origin of those names.

It’s the same sort of thing with place names. Just take creeks for example. Most of them are named after where they come from or lead to, or what you do in them. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out why. Yet there are some that defy these simple rules - like Johnny- All-Alone - and one wonders how they came to be named.

Back in Bulletin 164, Aidan de la Mare wrote about the new Landranger Ordnance Survey maps and I promptly bought those covering my local Essex and Suffolk areas. I have to confess, I can spend hours pouring over maps and charts, figuring how you can get from point A to point B. Back in the days when I sailed a Mirror, I worked out that with certain winds and tides, I could sail down one river on the ebb, take the flood up the next, traverse the short distance from my landing point back to the car, return, and ultimately collect the boat to go home. So maps became important in my planning.

So did a pair of roller skates! The plan was to take them on the trip and skate back to the car, taking less time than walking or waiting for a bus. My wife was horrified at the idea. It had been years since I’d skated, she protested and now I was old. The word stung and I showed her just how good I was by skating up the road, getting back full of pride, ‘Well?’ I said. She still looked sceptical but was silenced. Over her shoulder as she walked back into the house, she said ‘Don’t forget to take off your life jacket will you, or you’ll look an awful ninny’.

But when, after several years, I’d not completed my ‘dream trip’ and I had indeed begun to feel old, I changed the Mirror for a small cabin boat and the skates went to the grandchildren. The fascination with maps - and names - remained however.

Sailing as I do from Walton On Naze, only 5 miles south of Harwich, I frequently go on up the nearby Stour, and this was the first Landranger map I looked at. Sure enough Holbrook Creek leads up to Holbrook. To the east of this, across the mud in Ewarton Bay a thin line shows Cockle Creek, doubtless the local source of this delicacy. But right in between, just west of Ewarton Ness is Johnny- All-Alone Creek. It’s not shown on the smaller scale maps and it immediately began to fascinate me. How the dickens did it get its name?

And so began my search. First, I sailed near, searching for it through binoculars, and finally I went by road for a closer look. By one of those fortuitous coincidences that seem to stalk my life, I met Bob and his wife who no longer live in the locality, but were on a day visit to some old haunts. Bob knew the creek by its name and told me how he used to play there as a youngster. “It was bigger then of course,” he assured me, “And Wrinch, who owned the land hereabouts, had several spritsail barges that took farm produce to London, returning with horse manure for the fields. They used to be anchored off here regularly when I was a lad.” But he had no idea of how it came to be named.

In truth it’s no longer what we would think of as a creek. Since the disastrous flood on the east coast back in 1953, a sea wall has been built up and Johnny-All-Alone is now scarcely more than a rill flowing through a storm drain built into the wall. Languidly it continues through a gully, over the saltings and into the Stour. So don’t go there expecting to spend a night in this strangely named spot.

Next, my search took me to Robert Simper’s delightful book about the River Stour and Orwell. He tells us that in the nineteenth century, a fisherman named Johnny Shilling lived there. And there was a quay, last used in 1947 before being pulled down when the seawall was rebuilt after ’53. So perhaps that was the ‘Johnny’ part of the riddle? Was it he or his dwelling that was “all alone”? And how did the ‘All-Alone’ part come to be added anyway?

When I wondered ‘how the dickens did it get its name?’, I may have been nearer the truth than I realised. By yet another of those coincidences, I began reading Bleak House, by Charles Dickens in which there’s a place called Tom-All-Alones. It was pretty central to the plot and was described as a tumbledown place, probably like a modern ‘blighted’ property used as a squat. The book contained some notes on the author’s choice of title in an appendix. Apparently, his first thought had been along the lines of Tom-All-Alone’s/ The Ruined House. His second was Tom- All-Alones/ The Solitary House/ that never knew happiness/ that was always shut up. His next combined the Tom-All-Alone with The Ruined Building, The Ruined Mill, the Solitary House and of course poverty.

Authors like Dickens and Thackeray, to name but two, had an enormous impact on the early Victorians, many of whom had only recently learned to read. It was, in consequence, a period when monthly story magazines flourished and indeed, Bleak House - Dickens’s eventual choice of title -was first serialised in one before being published in book form. These stories and their characters were as much a talking point in their day as any of our TV soap operas. In Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” (also serialised before coming into book form), Captain Dobbin, loved the heroine from afar over many chapters - and as many years - before finally winning her. He was the original plodder who got there in the end. His name was adopted by countless rag and bone men, milkmen and baker’s delivery men, for the horses that pulled their carts. When I was a lad, a ‘Dobbin’ was any slow, lumbering, yet enduring horse.

So would Johnny’s residence - which was probably a bit solitary, perhaps badly maintained, and not maybe the source of much joy - have been given its name during the 1850’s after Dickens’s Tom? And the creek that led there would derive its name from this? I’m not likely to find out for certain now, but it does seem a reasonable possibility doesn’t it?

And what about Shepherd’s Pie and Cottage Pie? A chef put me right on this. True Shepherds Pie, it seems, is made from minced left over lamb, whilst Cottage Pie is made from minced beef. But he still couldn’t tell me how Toad in the Hole got its name - or the even less appetising Chop Toad! Nor can I find how a creek near Aldeburgh came to be called ‘Pig Pail’. Any suggestions?