The current situation
Updated 23 October 2025
The newly constructed Balliemore Bridge in Glen Lean, Cowal, opened to traffic on Tuesday 21 October, marking a major milestone in Argyll and Bute Council’s infrastructure recovery efforts following severe weather in 2023.
The bridge is now open to the public road users, with surrounding works ongoing in the coming weeks to finalise the scheme, including the removal of the temporary diversion road and temporary bridge.
The new bridge has an increased span length over the original bridge, and the foundations are protected by steel sheet piles to reduce the risk of further scour and undermining events from future storms. Whilst the location is remote from adjacent houses, both the landowner Ardtaraig Estate and residents have been accommodating of the works to ensure the B class public road network remained in operation throughout the scheme.
Read the full story in our news release.
Updated: 28 August 2025
Work at Balliemore Bridge has been progressing well. We anticipate that the bridge will be open to the public by early October 2025. Other site works will run until late November 2025.
Local residents may be aware that the contractor has temporarily paused work at the site. This is to allow them to address a technical design query and procure a specialist product to continue with the next stage of laying the road. We expect this product will be delivered during the week commencing 1 September, after which work will once again resume.
The main structure and the majority of earthworks are now complete. The upcoming phases of work require less heavy plant and equipment and so the machinery and materials that are no longer essential to the project have been demobilised from the site.
Updated: 6 June 2025
Six precast, 15- metre long, pre-stressed concrete deck beams arrived on site ready to be installed onto the reinforced concrete abutments on Wednesday 4 June.
A 130 tonnes capacity crane was required to take into account the safe working radius and capacity of the lifting operations.
Beams were lifted into place successfully, and are being secured together. The next stage will be to install pre-cast wing walls, and further deck reinforcement in preparation for the in-situ concrete deck pour.
The previous situation
Conduit, provided by Openreach, has been installed at the temporary bridge. This enables Openreach to divert its cables from the exiting bridge to the permanent bridge.
The design for the new bridge is complete and our contractor has confirmed that over the next three to four weeks, work will begin to demolish and remove the old bridge. Constructing the new bridge will begin in the New Year.
Latest update on October 2023 weather event
After 7 October 2023, the council constructed a diversion road through a field to the north west of Balliemore Bridge, which allowed a temporary bridge to be placed slightly upstream of the existing bridge. The temporary bridge arrived onsite on 28 November and the road was opened safely on 1 December.
Conduit has been placed along the temporary bridge to carry the Openreach cabling.
