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According to Google Maps, the town of Argleton nestles just south of Ormskirk in Lancashire.
In reality, however, it doesn’t exist at all. Where it’s marked on the search giant’s map service is actually an expanse of fields.
Apparently the inclusion of the mythical Argleton is a simple mistake, according to the company that provides the data for the maps, Tele Atlas.
The Telegraph quoted a spokesman from the company as saying: “Mistakes like this are not common, and I really can’t explain why these anomalies get into our database.”
However, as always with the Internet, there are darker conspiracy theories as to the story behind the town.
Some suggest that it’s a joke, as Argleton is an anagram of “not real G”, the G standing for Google. Though the added “g” seems a bit strange, surely they could have just called it Arleton if that was the case.
A more likely theory is that it was added as a copyright protection measure, to trap people who pinch data from Google for their own cartographic purposes.
We reckon a third possibility is that someone had one too many pints on a Friday lunchtime, and it just seemed like a good idea at the time.
There are quite a few locations out of place on Google Maps. According to Google maps most of Warrington is in Birchwood, this includes places like Bewsey that are at least 5 miles from Birchwood. I have pointed this error out to Google Maps about 3 months ago, and yet my house is still classed as being in Birchwood, and yet we’re in Bewsey, and between Bewsey and Birchwood you have Longford, Orford, Padgate, Woolston and Cinnamon Brow – please try and get it right eventually Google!
The word “Argleton” is over part of the edge the town called “Aughton” which looks like a computer-generated ‘typo’ perhaps due to an OCR misreading of “Aughton” where ‘u’ is misread as ‘r’ and ‘h’ is misread as ‘le’ – easy to see how optical character recognition could make such a mistake if an unusual font, say, were being misread.