Monumental invention

Recently I've been doing a little research into the place names of Scotland and North West England. (This site in particular is hoovering up oodles of my time.) In the process I discovered that the Pennines owe their name to an 18th-century literary forgery. The various ranges of hills and peaks simply didn't have a unified designation until a minor English writer living in Denmark made one up out of whole cloth. (Obviously, though, it owes something to the British placename element pen(n)- "head, summit", not to mention the Apennines of Italy.) Someone stuck it on an Ordinance Survey map and it was never taken off.

It's fascinating to me the number of Romantic literary forgeries are out there and how influential they've been. I've known about a few of them for ages (like Ossian or Iolo Morganwg's "Old Welsh" poetry), but it seems like whenever I go poking about I come across more. Some have become the basis for entire religions, so a toponym or two would seem to be par for the course. And it's not surprising it should be a mountain range, since it was the Romantic movement that led to a revalorisation of these as places of great natural beauty and tourist sites.