Low Wood Junction

Low Wood Junction is junction 4A of the M80 and is the main exit for traffic from Glasgow or England to Cumbernauld. Although on the face of it little has changed in the last 40 years, it has actually had a complex development period before its current layout was completed.

The current junction primarily provides south west facing slips for the A8011 onto the M80, and vice versa. As this is also the western end of the A8011, the basic principle is a fork junction with no facility to double back. Traffic from the A8011 is also able to continue north on to the B8048 via an apparently unclassified road, with southbound traffic from the B8048 joining the M80 offslip. Finally, a slip road from the M80 offslip also connects to the unclassified link to the B8048. The B8048 indirectly provides for all other movements via the Auchenkilns Junction, Junction 5. To further confuse matters, before the slip roads from Low Wood fully merge to form the A8011, sliproads for the trumpet Condorrat Junction are met.

History

Low Wood has its origins in the early 1960s when the A80 was dualled on a partial new alignment which bypassed Condorrat and Cumbernauld Village. This seems to have been done in advance of the main construction phases of Cumbernauld New Town. In the first instance, Condorrat was provided with a pair of fork junctions at either end of the bypass connecting to the A80, although only the eastern one had central reservation gaps. This section of Main Road appears to have been a spur of the B802, and the junction lay a little to the west of the current onslip. As the 1960s progressed, so the A8011 was being built westwards from Cumbernauld Village, and the 1974 OS One Inch map shows it has reached Condorrat, with Low Wood Junction in place.

As first depicted in 1971 the junction is largely in its current form as far as the M80 and A8011 are concerned, however the connections to the minor roads are very different. The junction is depicted as a simple fork, with none of the current minor road connections, and the Condorrat Junction has not yet been built. The only minor road shown to interact with the junction at this stage is the Condorrat Ring Road, which is still shown as connecting to the A80 in the same way it did before the A8011 reached the junction. However, there is also a road marked as continuing to fork from the A8011-A80 onslip, although the scale of the map makes it difficult to be sure what connections are being provided.

By 1974, the connection to the B802 spur appears to remain in place, and is now coloured as the B802, while none of the northern connections to the B8048 are yet marked. There is also an additional connection from the Condorrat Ring Road onto the A8011-A80 onslip, while the corresponding slip road at the newly built Condorrat Junction is not shown. It is not clear when the northern links to the B8048 were added in to the junction layout.

With the upgrade of the A80 to become the M80 planned, a number of changes were carried out to the junction, although precise dates for some of the works seem to be hard to ascertain. The original slip to the B802 was perhaps the first to be closed, and then the connection to the onslip to the east was closed up in 2009 as work on the motorway progressed. This was by then a duplicate anyway, as the same movement had been provided for with a steep slip added to the Condorrat Junction.

Routes

Route	To	Notes
M80	Stirling, Kincardine Bridge (M876)	access only from M80
M80	Glasgow (M8)
A8011	Kirkintilloch, Kilsyth, Cumbernauld, Condorrat, (B8048)
	Stirling (M80), Kirkintilloch (B8048), Kilsyth (B802)
A80	Stirling (M80), Kincardine Bridge (M876)
A80	Glasgow, (M8)