A useful account of a place has five parts and can be written in an hour.
First, what is there: the buildings, the shrines, the memorials, the trees, the water, in plain description.
Second, what happened: dated where possible, with the source named, whether that source is a document or a person.
Third, who said so: the name and age of anyone who told you something, and whether they agree to be named.
Fourth, what is disputed: where two people in the village say different things, both versions, without picking one.
Fifth, what is not known: the questions the account raises and cannot answer.
That last part is what makes an account correctable, and a correctable account is worth more than a confident one. Every page on this site is built on that structure, and the pages that fail are the ones where the fifth section is thin because the writer did not know enough to know what was missing.
A good account names the place, gives the date it was written, says who told the writer, and says what the writer does not know.
It is specific. A wall with a date on it, a memorial with names, a shrine with a keeper and a fair on a particular day are all worth more than a general statement that the village is old.
It separates what is remembered from what is documented. A story is worth having and it is not the same thing as a record, and a good account says which of the two it is offering.