Day 161, naming convention, Narrow Walk with LED lights

This footpath lies behind houses in the suburbs of Sheffield, running along side a piece of space that used to contain two reservoirs. There is no signpost to indicate the name, there has never been a signpost.  Google appears to have named the gennel as Elmore Footpath, which doesn't seem unreasonable if it doesn't have a name.  It also happens to be close to Elmore Road.  Elmore Road isn't actually its name.  That name has probably appeared by a local human having at some point labelled the path with that name using Google.



The real name can be seen on older maps of the area.  Proper maps that is, not the 'almost proper' maps such as those provided by Google.  The walkway, path, gennel, is actually called Narrow Walk.  And it is quite narrow.

I have nothing against areas picking up new names based on human preference and common usage, although in this case I've never heard this path referred to as Elmore Footpath.  Human preference naming happens all the time, The Ponderosa somewhat further down the hill was actually called Port Mahon but the new name stuck and has been adopted.  In fact people are now referring to it as Ponderosa Park, which might eventually stick as well.  No doubt this happens all the time and is a feature of historic changes - although with formalised mapping by organisations like the Ordnance Survey these changes probably have slowed down significantly.

However with the advent of numerous online mapping tools and individual, un-vetted, human interaction giving the ability to name things, then it's possible for names to change as often as the tides.  Perhaps place names will change more often now Google has input and by default decides that any befuddled, beer-filled fool is the authoritative source of information about something because they are the only person to have named a thing.  The scope for tomfoolery and pranks is tremendous.  That's almost certainly how the US city named after a European country ended up being named after the county town of Yorkshire, all part of a joke after the English took over - that's New Amsterdam to New York.  Some pamphleteer in 1664 writing in the 17th Century equivalent of Google, befuddled and beer filled on the recently invented Kronenberg having a laugh at the expense of the new world.

Flickr also has examples of this, they seem to think that Crooksmoon is a place rather than Crookesmoor, which is pretty good, I've not met anyone that dislikes this error.  I suspect that Flickr doesn't have the sort of clout that other services have and this will not fall in to common usage.


Here's Narrow Walk from top to bottom.  The labels on each of the new LED lights also show the name of the path, that's probably the first time it has ever been written there.