Dobbies Loan

Dobbie's Loan is Junction 16 on the M8, and provides a pair of east-facing slips to connect the A804 and A879 to the motorway. It also indirectly provides the main link between the motorway and the A81. Situated to the north of Glasgow city centre, right next to the Glasgow Branch of the Forth and Clyde Canal at Port Dundas, the junction was originally intended to be part of something bigger, but this never happened.

The Motorway slips connect to the city road network via a signalised junction underneath the M8. From here the A879 heads north, out of the city, while the A804 heads both south east to Townhead, J15 on the M8 and west through the site of the proposed but never built Port Dundas Interchange to meet the A81, and so onto the A82 at Charing Cross.

The close proximity of the proposed, full access, Port Dundas Junction is why West facing slips were never built at Dobbies Loan, although in fairness the only real downside to continuing east along the A804 to join the M8 at Townhead is the complexity of that junction.

The motorway junction is named as the A804 is called Dobbie's Loan. According to the Dictionary of the Scots Language, a loan was a term used before the enclosing of fields for a strip of grass of varying breadth running through the arable part of a farm and frequently linking it with the common grazing ground of the community, serving as a pasture, a driving road and a milking place for the cattle of the farm or village and as a common green. The Glasgow History website states that "Dobbie's Loan is in great part an old Roman or military road, and was until the beginning of the last century a straggling path which in the sixteenth or seventeenth century formed the access to the crofts and common pasture on the north-west of the city, and apparently had its name from John Dobbie, who owned land early in the seventeenth century outside the Stable Green Port, and members of the Dobbie family continued to hold land in the district for a hundred and fifty years afterwards."

Maps

The junction in 1968 before the westwards extension.	The junction shown in 1972.

Routes

Route	To	Notes
M8	Edinburgh, Stirling (M80), Carlisle (M74)
A804	Aberfoyle (A81)
A804	George Square, City Centre
A879	Port Dundas, Milngavie
	George Square	Canal Street