Work on a £7 million road improvement project in Cumbria is now complete.

The Highways England scheme along the A66 at Bassenthwaite Lake involved a series of major engineering improvements, including raising carriageways, to improve flood resilience from the lake.

Overall, five sections of the route, a mix of dual carriageway and single carriageway sections, have improved since the project started last September.

The phases included:

• £1.5m spent on raising the eastbound and westbound carriageways by 70 centimetres at Embleton where it runs alongside Dubwath Beck.

• £600,000 realigning and raising the westbound carriageway alongside the lake near Smithy Cottage.

• £2m and £1.7m projects to raise the carriageway alongside the lake's two Osprey-watching sites alongside the lake near Thornthwaite


• £1.1m stabilisation work along the rock face along the westbound carriageway to prevent severe weather land slippage

Highways England also delivered extra resurfacing - along other sections of the route - to save closing the road again, cleared 40 tonnes of storm debris from a large culvert underneath the road, improved pedestrian crossing facilities at Dubwath crossroads, and built a new bus shelter complete with bat roosts. An improved and enlarged layby was also delivered.

Raising the carriageway over a total length of 1.6 km, plus resurfacing a total of 3.2 km of the road, has involved using 31,000 tonnes of surfacing material. Other highlights include;

• almost 2 km of new safety barriers

• 1 km of new kerbs and drainage

• 250 metres of gabion wall

• Six new flood relief culverts and 800 metres of filter drain

• 1,600 large soil nails to improve embankment stability

• 2,550 square metres of rock netting

Highways England project manager Peter Gee said: "This is a significant investment in the county's road network and will provide even greater resilience during severe weather incidents – keeping local people and the economy on the move.

"Working to deliver these improvements at five different sites has been a major engineering and project planning challenge – not least in raising the height of the carriageway by almost 1.5 metres in places. We'd like to thank drivers and other local people for their patience over the last 11 months with temporary traffic lights and overnight carriageway closures."

(LM/MH)