Argleton: Google's phantom town

The power of Google is well documented, but locals from Lancashire in the UK are shocked by the search engine giant's ability to create a phantom town right in their neighbourhood.

"Argleton" does not exist, and has never existed ... but it's a different story on Google Maps.

A village bearing that name appears on the online map tool, alongside the A59 major road in Lancashire and just south of Ormskirk.

Search for the town on Google and it also boasts doctors, vacant jobs, houses to rent and even a golf club.

But in reality, the co-ordinates where Google claims the town sits point to little more than a vacant, muddy field, The Guardian reports.

Neither Google, nor the company that supplies its mapping data for this part of Britain, were able to explain how the phantom town made its way on to Google Maps, The Telegraph said.

But the use of Google data in other online information services means Argleton has moved beyond being just a map location to also appearing in listings about real estate, employment and weather reports. For example, when someone uses Google Maps to search for businesses in Argleton, they are shown entries for Mossack Hall Golf Club and Hope Street Hotel. Both businesses exist, but neither is actually in Argleton.

The non-existent town has now even spawned souvenirs and merchandise, akin to major cities such as New York or London.

T-shirts can be bought online bearing slogans such as: "I visited Argleton and all I got was this T-shirt" and "New York, London, Paris, Argleton".

Mike Nolan, who works at Edge Hill University in nearby Ormskirk, told how he discovered the village online.

"I grew up in the area and spotted on the map one day that it said 'Argleton'," he told The Guardian.

"But it's just a farmer's field close to the village hall and playing fields. I think a footpath goes across the field, but that's all."

Mr Nolan grew up in Aughton, which neighbours Argleton, and initially thought Google had accidentally renamed his childhood town. But Aughton is also on the map, next to Argleton.

Another Edge Hill University staff member, Roy Bayfield, also discovered the town on Google and decided he had to pay a visit.

"The possibility of actually visiting an imaginary place seemed irresistible ... so today I decided to make the expedition - from the world we know to a fictitious and uncertain place," he wrote on his blog in February.

Although seeing nothing more significant than empty fields and bits of discarded rubbish, Mr Bayfield wrote jokingly of his trip to the "epicentre" of Argleton, as though it were "an alternate universe".

"Mundane as this may seem, I kept my eyes peeled for signs and portents - not knowing what relevance a strange map created from a faded planning notice, a partial alphabet tool in a closed-down garage, some broken fencing in the shape of a rune or a burning web may have in later stages of the journey," he wrote.

One theory for Argleton's presence in the map is that it was deliberately added as a trap for those who infringed copyright and copied the map, The Telegraph said.

Fake streets were occasionally inserted in maps for this purpose, but it was rare to find an entire town conjured up, it said.

But Professor Danny Dorling, the president of the Society of Cartographers, told The Guardian it was most likely just included as an "innocent mistake".

Google, too, said that, while the vast majority of its data was correct, "there are occasional errors".