B946

The B946 runs along the Fife coast on the south bank of the Firth of Tay.

Route

Wormit

The route begins at the "Sandford junction" some 3 km north-east of Kilmany on the A92 and heads north; immediately a private road on the right leads to St Fort and a bus depot at the old station site. The B946 rises steeply past the former Sandford Hotel driveway and then descends at a lesser gradient to Newton Farm, where there is a popular fishing pond. A sharp right-hand bend leads under a railway bridge and past the access to the sand quarry before continuing past the unclassified Links Wood road (that leads back to Five Roads Roundabout on the A92) and the Gauldry junction to enter the former Burgh of Newport-on-Tay at Wormit as Kilmany Road. At first there is just a string of houses facing fields to the north east of the road, but then a new housing estate is growing on the opposite side.

Wormit

New housing continues on the left as the route curves onto Naughton Road, which briefly runs alongside and above the railway. The houses on the east side of the road are even further elevated, enjoying grandstand views out across the Tay to Dundee. The railway can then be seen spearing off across the Tay Bridge while the B946 drops down onto Riverside Road, where hedges, houses and high garden walls conspire to block any view of the river. The route then takes a double bend around the Wormit Boating Club onto St Fort Place, and winds more closely along the shore for a time before becoming West Road. In the past there was a break in the houses here between Wormit and Newport on Tay, but in the second half of the twentieth century, development merged to the two settlements together, and the boundary is no longer so clear.

Newport - Tayport

The derelict site of the former Netherlea House hospital marks the start of Newport and West Road, which soon has a line of buildings along the seaward side once more. At the foot of Castle Brae sits the old toll house on the left and "castle" on the right as the road narrows drastically. The road continues to wind north east along the bottom of the steep hillside with the houses on the south hugging the road and on the north sitting down towards the river. At the Kinbrae Park junction the road splits, with westbound traffic following the High Road and eastbound taking Boat Brae and Boat Road before the roads re-unite at a mini roundabout at the Newport Hotel on the High Street. This one way system was introduced with the building of the Granary Lane sheltered accommodation in the 1980s; however both roads have been classified since 1922.

Climbing the High Street there is a mini-roundabout junction with the B995 Cupar Road at the Chip Shop, with the B946 continuing north along Tay Street with a brilliant view of Dundee and the Tay Road Bridge across the top of the Newport Braes. Tay Street kinks right and runs out of Newport past some fine Victorian Villas, no doubt built by Dundee Industrialists who could afford to commute to their mini empires by steamer every day, and enjoy the tranquility of the countryside in the evenings and weekends. At the edge of the village the Tay Road Bridge looms overhead and the speed limit changes to 40 mph. The route then climbs up below a large viewpoint car park to a junction from where a spur of the B946 heads off to the right to reach the A92 at the Tay Bridge Roundabout just to the south of the bridge.

Road to Tayport

The B946 now becomes the Newport Road for the final stretch. A parking area on the north side shows where the road used to cross the railway, which crossed diagonally; however, this has been upgraded recently and the remaining evidence is limited to the line of the shared-use path leading to Tayport Common. At the cemetery a sign proclaims that you are entering Ferryport-on-Craig, this being the name of the original part of Tayport until the North British Railway redubbed the village Tayport. Here the limit changes to 40 mph and then becomes 30 mph before the road crosses a mini-roundabout at the foot of Scotscraig Crescent and plunges into Tayport proper on Albert Street. The road through Tayport is as narrow as that through Newport in places.

The B946 then ends by running end-on into the B945. However, the actual point where the two routes meet appears to be fairly arbitrary, with different maps giving different places. The large scale OS maps from the 1940s through to the 1960s all seem to agree that the first stretch of Albert Street is the B946, with the number changing at the kink at Fairy Lane from where the B945 heads off south east. Google Maps have moved the meeting point west to the Braid Road junction, while Open Street Map have taken it south to the mini roundabout at the far end of William Street. The Fife council list say that all of Albert Street is part of the B946, although this is contrary to the base mapping used to display this information. None of the other maps available give enough detail to identify the meeting point.

History

In 1922 the B946 only ran between Newport and Tayport only. Whereas its eastern end is (probably) unchanged, its original western end was on the A92 (now B995) at the northern end of the High Street. Bizzarely, mapping evidence suggests that the A92 'paused' and the road number for the High Street and past the pier was A914, despite the A92 resuming on the far side of the ferry. The High Road in Newport was originally given its own number as the A954. This situation continued until the construction of the Tay Road Bridge in 1966 took through traffic out of Newport. The roads bypassed became an extension of the B946.

The Cupar Road junction with Tay Street and High Street has had a number of configurations. Previously the priority was for traffic between High Street and Cupar Road as this was the mainline of the A92 for ferry traffic but the present mini-roundabout was put in place at some point in the 1990s owing to poor visibility for Cupar Road traffic when the priority was along the B946.

The 1922 MOT Road List defines this route as: Newport - Tayport