[zandorg]

But Google street view would have shown empty fields!

[jtbarrett]

No street view, but the satellite images match the allegedly non-existant streets shown in the article's screenshot. Curious.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

[NikkiA]

Actually, no, the area where your red marker is, is 'Aughton Park', Argleton is listed as being between Aughton and Aughton Park, as seen here:

http://imgur.com/1a12H.png

And thus google satellite view confirms it's just empty fields...

Edit: a slightly zoomed out google maps view will show the area with the labels a little better, like this:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

2nd Edit:

It's possible that this is all a misunderstanding, and not a 'fake entry', there is a farm directly under the area called 'Argleton', and it wouldn't be a first time for a farm to have it's own postal code, and then the name of the farm being assigned to the postcode. Thus that farm MAY be 'Argleton Farm' or such, and google picked up on it thinking it was a town name.

I've known of 3 cases of this happening in my (limited) wandering around the UK during my life, although those cases were on OS maps, not google maps.

[jtbarrett]

Oh, that's a pretty small area then. When I saw the map in the article I thought that the suggestion was that all those roads were non-existant. If it's just a blank area of map with a stray label then it's a lot less interesting, but makes a whole lot more sense of course. Thanks for the info.

[NathanKP]

Most of the satellite pictures are many years old so seeing empty fields wouldn't be a cause for worry. In my area there are many suburb areas that still show as empty fields despite the fact that they are huge neighborhoods now.