B8080

Cow Wynd

The B8080 is a relatively new number issued to a couple of newer roads stitched together with some older streets to create a through route to the south of Falkirk town centre.

The road starts on the rerouted B816 on the banks of the Forth and Clyde Canal and heads east along Westburn Avenue, a 1970s distributor road for modern housing estates. This wide, tree-lined parkway also passes a high school and the hospital before meeting the B803 at a pair of mini-roundabouts at Cockburn Street. The B803 has also been rerouted around the town centre, and so that road is now the dominant number in a multiplex eastwards along Hodge Street to Cow Wynd. Here the B803 TOTSOs south onto its old route, whilst the B8080 turns left and then curves eastwards once more as St Crispins Place, Arnot Street and Corporation Street. This is an older part of town, but has seen much redevelopment, so the road is now passing car parks and modern retail premises as much as the older streets of terraced housing.

The A803 is then met at the eastern end of the town centre, with another multiplex for the B8080 between two roundabouts. The B8080 therefore reappears a little further east along Callendar Road, and turns northwards on the new build Bellsmeadow Road to meet the A904. This final section parallels the A803 just a couple of hundred metres away and it is therefore curious why the two routes coexist. In many ways, it would make more sense to move the A803 out of town, and swap the numbers over, but this is not the case, and it is perhaps unlikely ever to happen.