A590
From Roader's Digest: The SABRE Wiki
The A590 is the mostly primary road between junction 36 of the M6 and the town of Barrow-in-Furness. It runs north-east to south-west, forming the southern boarder of the Lake District for part of its route. Originally terminating at a t-junction on the A6, it now ends at the M6 following at TOTSO with the A591. Its traditional route, as outlined below, was made up of a series of local roads which connected together. Many of these have been by-passed or redeveloped.
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| Map needed: File:A590.png | |||||||||||||
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| From: | Crooklands (SD533825) | ||||||||||||
| To: | Walney Island (SD178675) | ||||||||||||
| Via: | Ulverston,Barrow in Furness | ||||||||||||
| Length: | 44.9 miles (72.3 km) | ||||||||||||
| Meets: | M6, A6, A591,A5092,A595,A5087 | ||||||||||||
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| Barrow-in-Furness • Kendal • | |||||||||||||
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Contents |
History
Being a dotty eccentric and a non-driver, I'm more interested, on the whole, in where roads were rather than where they are now. So please bear with me while I recall the A590 of my childhood, that wonderful, wiggly, narrow, and at one point just plain surreal, switchback of a country lane that took my family back to my birthplace of Barrow-in-Furness and my grandparents.
Route (East to West)
Section 1:Crooklands -Newby Bridge
Before the tangled mess of A591 there is now, the A590 turned quietly to the left at a light-controlled T-junction. A quick wiggle amongst the trees and then a dramatic start. It was long, straight and flat across the floodplain of the Kent, opening out on the left to the sands of Morecambe Bay. We head directly for the dramatic long finger of Whitbarrow stretched out before us. Make the most of the long flat and straight, there ain't much and there ain't any more.
At the end of this stretch we come to a T-junction and a totso (oh I love that word, I've only known it for three days. And so useful - there are a lot of totsos to come on this road as it was in the early 1960s!) To the right the A5074 Lyth Valley road winds up to Bowness - a pleasant and quiet alternative to the A591 from Kendal. We go to the left, running along the foot of Whitbarrow. The junction is cut off and duelled now but the next bit, I believe, is pretty well as it was. It's starting to get a bit wiggly now as we hug the boundary between the high ground on our right and the marshes on our left. This is good stuff so far. Then, back in the really old days, we hit the dourly attractive village of Lindale with its slate terrace cottages clustered for comfort against the rain (it always seemed to be raining in these parts), and it's narrow streets. This was the southenmost tip of the A590. A nasty little right totso led straight into a long, straight steep hill up the skirts of Newton Fell. After a while the gradient levels out a little and the road takes on the character it will have for much of its length, twisting tortuously between rocks and lush, precipitious hillsides. There's a procession of Lancashire County Council village signs - no doubt somebody can rustle up a photo or two - we've had one for Lindale, now we have High Newton, which sticks in my mind, and there'll be a good many more before we've finished. A rectangular plate bearing village name surmounted by a kind of pediment with the road number in it.
We approach the northernmost point of the road and it's pretty here: a riverside stretch with woods which are gorgeous in the autumn. An American friend I passed through here with in October 1984 compared it to the Adirondacks, and when I saw the Adirondacks a couple of years later I could see her point. This, one of those Lancashire signs tells us, is Newby Bridge, southernmost tip of Windermere and haunt of coachloads of old dears. The A592 strikes off to the right to follow the lake to Bowness (and ultimately over the Kirkstone Pass to Ullswater). We, on the other hand, follow the River Leven as it swings round to the left through a narrow wooded gorge. Cracking stuff Gromit!
Section 2:Newby Bridge - Ulverston
Now, I said that there used to be something surreal along here and it's coming up now. Another of those signs says we've reached the village of Backbarrow and suddenly we're no longer in a dreamy wood; the road becomes very narrow and twists between high walls and gantries and factory gates like a Victorian industrial hell-hole, something like Dickens's Coketown. Only there's something bizarre about Backbarrow. It's blue! A luridly luminous shade of blue that clings to the factory walls and the little huddled houses and the rockfaces on the hillside and the road surface. This is the home of the Blue Works. They made Dolly Blue in Backbarrow, what my grandparents put in the dolly tub to make the clothes white. Backbarrow was bypassed by the mid-1960s. I don't know when Dolly Blue was last made there but the bllue staining started to fade eventually. The new road clings to the hillside high above the village, which is now as picture-postcard pretty as you please, no reason to believe it was industrially grimy within my lifetime!
We're on the north bank of the Leven now. More wiggling and switchbacking, and then we enter Greenodd, a very strange name. There a t-jonction and a totso left here - to the right is the A5092 signposted to Broughton-in-Furness and far-off, exotic Whitehaven! This road climbs sharply and comes out onto some gloriously bleak open moorland (Lowick Common and Kirkby Moor) on the way to meet the A595 Cumberland coast road at Grizebeck. There too it will pass the Burlington slate quarry, which is now closed I think but which played a part in the history of my family - in 1858 my great-great-grandfather and his two brothers travelled up from Cornwall to work in it. I have a book, a history of the quarries, which tells me a great deal about them.
Back at Greenodd we totso left at the junction. Ahead is the Lakeside railway, disused but with the tracks in place (shortly to be revived at the end of the 1960s as the preserved Lakeside and Haverthwaite Railway) sweeping in from the Leven, now a broad sandy estuary. The A590 swings right and runs right alongside the tracks for a while before climbing through Arrad Foot, still clinging to the boundary between fell and estuary. Soon the Hoad comes into view, with its tower - a replica of the first Eddystone Lighthouse whose designer came from Ulverston, the town we are about to enter.
Ulverston is a lovely little town. As well as being nursemaid to the lighthouse it was also the birthplace of Arthur Stanley Jefferson, known to the world as Stan Laurel. There is - or was in 1988 - a Laurel and Hardy museum in the town, as well as a lively market. Alas, the wonderful Hartley's Ales once brewed there are now defunct. I can't remember much about passing through - I don't recall a drag down a high street. I think there was a kind of inner relief road that passed close to the station, and now I think there's a new road carved right through the middle - hanging's too good for these planners!
Section 3: Ulverston - Dalton In Furness
Over a railway line - this the main line to Lancaster and, eventually, London, and climbing again into open grassy moorland. A village sign says Swarthmoor and at this point my mum invariably told us about coming here on Sunday School outings, which seemed odd because there was nothing here but a row of miners cottages. It would be another twenty years before I discovered that Swarthmoor is the spiritual home of worldwide Quakers - off to the left is Swarthmore [sic] Hall where George Fox shacked up with Thomas and Margaret Fell (and married Margaret after Thomas's death).
Onward and upward to Lindal-in-Furness - not to be confused with the earlier Lindale - a former mining village high on a bleak hill which once had a lovely little Hartleys pub, the Miners Arms. Then a long drop into Dalton-in-Furness. Dalton feels as though it was much more important once, and it was, once the most important town in the district. It's got a big church and a market strung out along a long, winding main street and in 1988 at least the long-closed cinema still had a glorious art-deco facade. The road swings right and then immediately there's a totso left as the A595 goes straight ahead, up a long hill on its way round the coast to Carlisle. The A590 on the other hand drops downwards, meets the railway line just as it emerges from a short tunnel, and begins a new phase in its life. It's still undulating and winding but it's wide now as it begins its run into Barrow. Whatever else Barrow roads are, they are wide. Wider, I think, than the roads anywhere else I know. We get romantic glimpses of the ruines of Furness Abbey on the left.
Section 4:Dalton in Furness - Walney Island
This is good stuff, but not for long. Well, it was always very nice. There was no Barrow-in-Furness before about 1840 and the town fathers, eager to make a mark even if there was nobody around for miles to see it, devised a ceremonial approach to the town, a great, wide, tree-lined boulevard. It seems to go on for ever. We'll pass the Risedale Maternity Hospital (where I was born), and the dingy old Duke of Edinburgh Hotel by the railway station, which passed for luxury in them days. There are also interminable traffic lights, and dark-blue Barrow Corporation buses on square wooden wheels with (uniquely, I think, colour-coded route indicators rather than route numbers. On weekday peaks - morning, evening and dinner-time, all scheduled bus routes were off as everything converged on the shipyard).
At last we reach Ramsden Square, with a grand Victorian statue of a City Father (Mr Ramsden), and now we're going to go totso-crazy. Totso-left into Duke Street, passing the blood-red sandstone Town Hall on the right. Totso-right into Michaelson Road, across the dock where, in the early 1991s when I visited my cousins by train, you could see the last nuclear sub, cynically dubbed 'HMS Redundant' by the shipyard workers about to lose their only livelihood. Then between gaunt red cliff-like industrial buildings and railway lines - there are railway lines everywhere, we are on Barrow Island now which was owned by British Railways in them days - to a huge crossroads where we totso-right into Ferry Road - more railways bunched on the right behind a fence and swerving across the road into the works. Then some lights and a totso-left to cross the Jubilee Bridge and the Walney Channel. If the weather's right - in other words it's one of the rare days when it's not tipping it down because I'm sure Barrow must be the rainiest town in Britain - there are small boats on the channel and stunning views - the Scafell range in the distance to the right. Then we're on Walney and the quality of the light screams SEASIDE! at is. At the end of the bridge we totso-left. High above us in the early 1960s, bizarrely, was the Walney Cinema. In a short distance we swing into a right fork into Ocean Road. Then it's straight across the island, built up at first, opening out into dunes and marshes on the Irish Sea side, to Biggar Bank and the end of the A590. There was an open-air swimming pool by the beach, and a pebbly beach dropping down to flat sands with rock pools to be explored and safe bathing until late on a summer evening, watched over by the dramatic whale-back of Black Combe. But don't shout out too loud because this best of all English beaches is still an unspoilt secret and we don't want everybody coming do we?
Changes
Although the A590 remains largely the same as that described above, there have been road improvements and bypasses since. Most notably, the road now completely bypasses Dalton-in-Furness, and enters Barrow along a different route. The road now begins at the M6, following the renumbering of the A591 Kendal Link Road in the 1990s between Sizergh and the M6. The A590 continues down a slip road and along the now largely D2 (with one small S2) road to the Lindale bypass, itself built in the 1980s. This connects to the newest section of road, the Newton and Ayside bypass opened in 2008. Between this bypass and Backbarrow, the road reverts to S2 and remains largely as before, passing through Newby Bridge. Backbarrow is now also bypassed, with the road cutting above the village and the River Leven. The road between Backbarrow and Ulverston varied between relatively narrow S2 and the D2 bypasses of the villages of Greenodd and Arrad Foot. Ulverston's inner relief road is now under 40 and 30 Mph speed limits, and is largely D2.
Between Ulverston and Dalton-in-Furness the road remains largely unchanged, and is arguably at its narrowest passing through the villages of Swarthmoor and Lindal-in-Furness. The line of the road has been straightened out, however. Sharp-eyed travellers will spot, between Swarthmoor and Lindal, the old road crossing the railway line on a skewed bridge to the left, while on leaving Lindal the original line can be seen on the right forming part of a farmer's field. The WS2 Dalton-in-Furness bypass adds the unusual site of lions, giraffes and rhinos roaming the Cumbrian fields of the South Lakes Wild Animal park, and also connects to a new terminus of the A595 and a newly developed WS2 entrance road into Barrow passing the factories and redeveloped land on the town's former steelworks site. Towards Barrow's town centre the road is no longer primary, and follows a one-way system through the redeveloped dock-lands. The A590 then follows the very WS2 (widened to transport large loads for the shipyard) to the Jubilee Bridge onto Walney Island and rejoins its previous route over the island to the sea.
Original Author(s): Di Blanchard
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