The Cock and Bull…

The flowers are a bit lost but there is a hanging basket at each end of the fascia board of the pub so I’ve sort of hit the theme for Tiny Tuesday.
On the bottom left of the building you can see a painted red number 7. When the Germans invaded Guernsey they found navigating the island’s roads impossible; it didn’t help that there were no road signs. Ever efficient the Germans created a grid system of colours and numbers and Hauteville was on Red Route 7. When I was young we lived near the yellow route and lots of yellow signs were still visible. Sadly few have survived.
You can probably guess my saying for today…
The phrase "cock and bull story" originated in the early 17th century from a misunderstanding or adaptation of the French phrase "coq-à-l'âne" ("cock to donkey"), which meant an incoherent or nonsensical story. While a popular theory links it to two coaching inns, The Cock and The Bull, in Stony Stratford, England, where travellers exchanged tall tales, there is no definitive etymological evidence to support this folk etymology. 

French Origin
The term is thought to have derived from the French expression "coq-à-l'âne," meaning "cock to donkey". 

This French phrase was used to describe a rambling or abruptly changing story. 

Scottish speakers borrowed the term as "cockalane" in the early 17th century to refer to a disconnected story or satire. 

English Adoption
The English phrase "cock and bull story" emerged in the early 1600s, with its first known appearance in Robert Burton's 1621 work, The Anatomy of Melancholy. 

The term came to signify an idle, concocted, and unbelievable story. 

The "Cock and Bull" Inns Theory
One prominent theory suggests the phrase comes from two rival coaching inns, The Cock and The Bull, in Stony Stratford, England, a common stopping point for travelers. 

Travelers at these inns were said to tell increasingly exaggerated and fantastical stories, leading locals to refer to such tales as "cock and bull stories". 

However, this explanation is considered folk etymology by many sources, as there is no strong etymological support for it, notes Grammarphobia. 
The literal translation of ‘du coq à l’âne’ is ‘from rooster to jackass’, which nicely fits the meaning of the term. This was later taken up in Scots as “cockalayne”, again with the same meaning.
The first citation of ‘cock and bull’ in English that I know of is from the English dramatist John Day, in the comic play Law-trickes, 1608:
That boy is worth his weight in pearle, dist [do] marke [pay attention to] what a tale of a Cock and a Bull he told my father while I made thee and the rest away.
‘Cock and bull story’ is one of the most mis-attributed phrases in the language.
This reference to ‘a cock’ and ‘a bull’, which is duplicated in all the early 17th and 18th century citations of the phrase, lends support to the view that the stories were about cocks and bulls, that is, fanciful tales, rather than stories told in the Cock or the Bull.
The early date doesn’t entirely rule out the coaching inn story, as coaches were used for transport in England prior to 1621 and both establishments were in business before that date but, in my view, that derivation is a 20th century invention.
What is missing from the Stony Stratford tale, and this is commonplace in folk-etymological sources that attempt to connect language with a particular place (see by hook and by crook, for example), is any link between the supposed origin and the meaning of the phrase. Why should patrons of the Cock and the Bull have been any more likely to make up fanciful tales than anyone else?
Neither the Cock nor the Bull has distinguished itself in the making of the English language. The Bull now languishes under the outrageous ‘Inn Famous Bull’ pun on its inn sign. The Cock, in addition to the ‘cock and bull story’, has another cock and bull story all to itself. It is said to be the source of the nursery rhyme line ‘ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross’. The story goes that horses were hired at the Cock Inn by travellers on route to nearby Banbury. Again, this is tosh. A cockhorse has been a nursery term since at least the early 16th century, as this citation from Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Image of Governance, 1540, indicates:
“The dotyng pleasure to see my littell soonne ride on a cokhorse.”
It isn’t clear whether cockhorses were originally sticks with horses’ heads that children played with or a reference to children being bounced on the knee of an adult. What they were definitely not were horses hired from a pub thirty miles away.

And it’s not a cock and bull story to say that this used to be Whistlers an amazing restaurant whose speciality was steak cooked over an open fire!