As useful as it is to have easy access to digital maps of the world, they throw up some odd anomalies from time to time… like this one from Lancashire, here in the UK. Google’s maps of the area show a small village called Argleton, not far from Ormskirk. The thing is, there’s no such village.

The jury is still out on the cause of this cartographic aberration: the copyfight lobby suspects it’s a deliberate mistake planted in the mapping data by an organisation  keen to catch out those who reuse it without permission (much in the way that the Royal Mail salts its postcode databases with fake addresses so it can detect unlicensed use), but Occam’s Razor suggests it’s more likely a mistyped version of the nearby village of Aughton, or some other sort of data glitch that sneaked its way into the data. These things happen, after all, especially when you pay low hourly rates to large numbers of data entry monkeys… I know, I’ve been one.

But think for a moment – as digital maps become the norm (and given the price the Ordnance Survey charge for theirs, it’s not going t