What has created new folder caleld "blogging"?

[Gemini23]

Has anyone any suggestions...

I noticed suddenly appeared in my Google Webmaster tools 404 errors for pages not found... they refer to urls which are a 'mirror' image of my blog but created in a folder called "blogging" which didn't exist until about 3 days ago.... but doesn't contain any of the blog files.

Has anyone any idea what could have generated this folder automatically?

[lorax]

I've never heard of this issue with WordPress. Is is possible that you did something by accident? Have you made any edits to your htaccess file or added any new plugins or other adjustments to the WordPRess or Hosting setup?

[Gemini23]

I am not aware of anything specific happening...

It was around the time of a new template that my wordpress guy created but he assures me that this wouldn't have done it.

It was also around the time of a 'backup' which preceded the new template. But I understand the backup just creates the backup in the 'blog' folder (and I can see the backup there).

the blog itself is (and has been for a couple of years) in the format of www.example.com/blog/index.php/thursday24052012.html etc

and the dozens of new 404 pages not found showing as
www.example.com/blogging/index.php/thursday24052012.html

and the new folder seems to have generated a sitemap or at least was shown in my Google Webmaster Tools account as being the source of the links for the 'blogging' folder!

[g1smd]

Nothing has been "created" on your site if the URLs return 404. What has happened is that somewhere on the web there are now some links pointing to incorrect URLs. Wait for the WMT data to further update to include the backlink data. The links might be on some other site.

Ah, you posted again. Looks like someone made an error then corrected it by removing the duff stuff. But unfortunately not before Google had been in there. Set up a RewriteRule to mass redirect the incorrect URLs to the matching correct URL.

This redirect will appear very near the start of your htaccess file.

RewriteRule ^blogging/(.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]