IN Brief:
- The 1.4km A595 bypass opened on 2 August after almost two years of construction.
- Delivery included 100,000m³ of processed material, 4,500m of drainage, and 22,250m² of surfacing.
- The completed road removes two established bottlenecks from the principal route towards Barrow.
The A595 Grizebeck bypass has opened to traffic after almost two years of construction, removing the constrained sections at Dove Bank and Dove Ford Farm from the principal route through the village.
Story Contracting delivered the 1.4km single-carriageway road for Westmorland and Furness Council. The bypass entered service on 2 August, with the contractor stating that the scheme had been handed over on time and within budget.
Construction involved excavating and processing 100,000m³ of material, installing 4,500m of drainage, and laying 22,250m² of surfacing. The permanent works include a road bridge, an underpass, two new culverts, an extension to the existing Ellermire Bridge culvert, a new junction at Grizebeck, and extensive cutting works at Penn Hill.
The scheme received £23.31m from the Department for Transport, with further support from Westmorland and Furness Council and Team Barrow. Its immediate purpose is to improve safety and reliability on the A595, although the route also serves employment and investment around Barrow-in-Furness.
Earthworks and drainage defined the programme
The volume of excavated material made site processing central to the construction strategy. Earlier in the programme, approximately 72,000 tonnes had been removed at Penn Hill, with an estimated 52,000 tonnes reused to form the new route and associated structures.
Keeping suitable material within the scheme reduced imported fill, disposal movements, and heavy vehicle traffic on local roads. That benefit depended on testing, grading, moisture control, and careful sequencing because reused material still had to meet the engineering specification for its permanent location.
The Penn Hill cutting created one of the project’s most visible earthworks operations, but drainage carried equal importance. The road crosses and intercepts natural water routes, requiring pipes, culverts, channels, and attenuation areas to manage runoff without transferring flood risk to neighbouring land or properties.
A local beck was temporarily diverted to permit in-channel construction, with licensed specialists relocating fish before work proceeded. Two new culverts were installed, and the existing Ellermire Bridge culvert was extended, connecting the road scheme to a wider system that will require inspection and maintenance long after the construction compound has disappeared.
The new road bridge uses locally sourced Burlington stone to clad its exposed surfaces. The material ties the structure to the surrounding landscape, while the underlying bridge, abutments, approach ramps, drainage, and road restraint systems provide the less decorative engineering required for everyday use.
Environmental work includes more than 31,000 trees, shrubs, and hedgerow plants, together with habitat areas and bat and bird boxes. Around 500 trees were planted by residents during a community event, although establishment and maintenance over the first several seasons will determine how much of the intended landscape survives.
The contractor also recorded more than 350 volunteering hours on local projects, alongside employment, training, local procurement, and school-based science, technology, engineering, and mathematics activities. These commitments broadened the scheme’s local contribution but did not replace the basic delivery test of opening a safe, durable road.
Grizebeck’s former alignment was particularly restrictive for larger vehicles and through traffic travelling towards Barrow. Removing those pinch points should produce a more consistent route, reduce conflict through the village, and improve the movement of workers, goods, and construction materials supporting industrial growth further south.
The road’s relatively short length concentrates its value at a known constraint. A 1.4km bypass cannot transform the whole A595 corridor, but it can remove a section whose geometry and capacity affected journeys far beyond the village whenever congestion, large vehicles, or incidents restricted movement.
Material reuse also gives the completed scheme a practical resource-efficiency measure rather than a general sustainability claim. More than 50,000 tonnes of excavated material were retained within the works, avoiding the cost and disruption of removing it and importing an equivalent replacement.
Operational performance will now depend heavily on drainage, slope behaviour, pavement condition, and the establishment of the new landscape. The bypass has been designed around substantial earthworks and several water-management structures, making routine inspection essential if small defects are to be corrected before they disrupt the route.
Opening transfers responsibility from construction delivery to asset management. Story Contracting has completed the physical link, but the lasting result will be judged through safer journeys, reliable drainage, stable earthworks, and whether the road continues to remove the bottlenecks that justified the investment.
