A768

The A768 (renumbered from the B703 in the early 1930s) is a largely urban route between Eskbank (outside Dalkeith) and Bilston, running roughly parallel to the A720, City Bypass, throughout..

Route

The Loan, Loanhead

The route starts at Eskbank Toll, a busy 6-arm roundabout, with the A6094, B703, and B6392 (former A7) making up the other five arms. From this point the A768 heads in a westerly direction along the suburban Lasswade Road, initially passing large detached properties before more modern housing estates which generally sit back from the road. At the edge of town it crosses the A7 at the Melville Road Dykes Roundabout and continues west along the long straight Melville Dykes Road, passing a hotel and golf course before entering Bonnyrigg and Lasswade. It is a long steady hill down into the town, with the B704 forking left at signals just before the first house. At the bottom of the winding hill, which is called the High Street despite being devoid of shops, the road crosses the River North Esk, with a small riverside park facing a restaurant. A couple more pubs sit on the roadside just beyond as it begins to climb out of the valley once more. The climb is not so steep, but wooded and soon leaves the town behind.

The route then has to TOTSO left at traffic lights to cross the Wading Burn, before another climb past a scattering of large houses leads out onto fields. Soon, however, it enters another suburban town, Loanhead, and follows Lasswade Road past a mixture of large old houses and modern infill. The route continues to climb gently along Linden Place and then High Street (still no shops), before reaching a signalized crossroads in the town centre, which stretches away to the right along the B702, Clerk Street. The A768 continues to run west along The Loan, a long straight road of suburban housing, which eventually kinks slightly to the right. This marks the end of the houses, with Nivens Knowe Road running though an industrial area, again as a more or less straight road. The route finally comes to an end on the A701 at a signalised T junction at Bilston, a little to the south of the Straiton retail park.

History

The route was originally numbered as the B703 in 1922, but had been renumbered at some point between 1928 and 1932. While there have been a number of bypasses and realignments carried out on other routes in and around the Midlothian towns, the A768 seems to more or less follow its original route unchanged. The only notable exception is in Loanhead, where the original double bend from High Street onto The Loan, using the southern end of Clerk Street, was bypassed in the early 1960s by a short section of new road to the north.