Map traps and Mountweazels

Trap streets, phantom settlements and fictitious book entries

Rainy childhood afternoons found me gazing at Ordnance Survey maps, giddily tracing paths across pale brown contour lines that were dramatically close-bunched for hills and gorges, or meandering far apart in wide, gentle valleys.

Nowadays I join fellow cartophiles online, where I recently went down a rabbit hole only to discover that some roads and places on maps aren’t real, but fictitious, inserted deliberately. I was stopped in my tracks. Then my still childlike imagination swung into action. If it’s on a map, it must be real. So where are these places? Who lives there? Are they portals to parallel universes? Perhaps, for I’ve since discovered several stories featuring trap streets or phantom settlements.

In the Doctor Who episode ‘Face the Raven’, alien refugees hide in a London alley invisible to passers-by. Anyone noticing it on a map would assume it’s a trap street. The Doctor saves the refugees by searching for trap streets on a street map.

Truth is, map publishers include fictitious streets to discourage and prove copyright infringement. In 2005, the Geographers’ A-Z Map Company claimed there are “about 100” trap streets in the London A-Z Street atlas.

One phantom settlement even became real. Agloe was a fictional trap hamlet marked at a road junction on a map of New York State. In the 1950s, a shop was built there, named Agloe General Store because ‘Agloe’ is the word the builders saw marked on the map.

Copyright infringement prosecutions rarely succeed. Even if a map is eligible for copyright, courts usually decide that fictitious entries aren’t. Prosecutions are more successful when the map maker changes the depiction of an existing street instead. In 2001, the Automobile Association settled out of court for £20 million after copying Ordnance Survey maps. No fictitious entries were involved, the Ordnance Survey protected its copyright by using specific style features such as varying road widths.

Not using trap streets on maps also avoids the risk of interfering with road users’ navigation and sending them down non-existent roads and perhaps even into other dimensions.

Fictitious entries also occur in reference books, which often contain fake entries either as humorous hoaxes or to deter plagiarism. Again, legal action rarely succeeds. The Trivia Encyclopedia deliberately included false information about TV detective Columbo and then unsuccessfully sued Trivial Pursuit, who had copied it.

Fake entries in books are often called ‘mountweazels’ after Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, herself a fake entry in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. The entry stated that she was born in 1942, photographed unusual subjects such as New York City buses, Paris cemeteries and rural American mailboxes, and died aged 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine. She even has a Facebook page.

Probably the most well-known fake entries in serious reference works are:

• Zzxjoanw: a Maori drum. Rumbled because Maori does not use J, X or Z.
• Jungftak: a Persian bird – the male has just one wing, on the right, and the female one on the left. Too far-fetched, even for me.
• Esquivalience: wilful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities. Certain politicians spring to mind – I’ll be keeping an eye out for this one.

This article was originally posted in 2021 in the blog section of the website run by my colleagues at Accuracy Matters: Accuracy Matters | Home