Phantom town appears on Google Maps

Mysterious "Argleton" stumps online giant and Tele Atlas

Phantom town appears on Google Maps
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2 November 2009 12:28 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

The presence of a mysterious town on Google Maps has stumped locals, the online giant and its mapping data provider.

It seems no-one can explain why "Argleton" in Lancashire, a town that does not exist, appears in the L39 postcode area just south of Ormskirk.

According to locals, where Argleton should be is just "acres of green, empty fields".

Exciting conspiracy theorists, Argleton is an anagram of "Not Real G". As an aside, it's also an anagram of "toe gnarl", "rant ogle", "oral gent" and "lot anger".

"While the vast majority of this information is correct there are occasional errors", Google told The Telegraph, on Hallowe'en.

A spokesperson for Tele Atlas, the company behind Google Map's data said: "Mistakes like this are not common, and I really can't explain why these anomalies get into our database".

Mapping companies do add errors to their maps for copyright protection reasons, but it's said to be unusual for such an error to be the creation of an entire town.

 

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Comments

  • Hmmm.. deliberate errors usually look a bit more like this..

    http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Catalog_of_Errors     Posted by philbridges, United Kingdom
  • This is hardly " phantom town". On the map, it is just a blank area with "no data", much as described by the locals. . Posted by Atmywitzend, UK

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