Avonbridge is a small village which lies within the Falkirk

Falkirk (council area)

Falkirk is one of the 32 unitary authority council areas in Scotland. It borders onto North Lanarkshire to the south west, Stirling to the north west, West Lothian to the south east and, across the Firth of Forth to the north east, Fife and Clackmannanshire...

 council area of Scotland

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

. The village is 4.8 miles (7.7 km) south-southeast of the town of Falkirk

Falkirk

Falkirk is a town in the Central Lowlands of Scotland. It lies in the Forth Valley, almost midway between the two most populous cities of Scotland; north-west of Edinburgh and north-east of Glasgow....

. Avonbridge sits just inside the council boundary line between Falkirk and West Lothian

West Lothian

West Lothian is one of the 32 unitary council areas in Scotland, and a Lieutenancy area. It borders the City of Edinburgh, Falkirk, North Lanarkshire, the Scottish Borders and South Lanarkshire....

 councils.

The village lies at the junction of the B8028 and B825 roads and is a bridging point over the River Avon

River Avon, Falkirk

The River Avon is a river in Falkirk, Scotland. It originates near Cumbernauld, flows through Avonbridge, through the Avon Gorge, through Muiravonside Country Park, Falkirk, past the west of Linlithgow and enters the Firth of Forth near Grangemouth....

, hence the name Avonbridge. At the time of the 2001 census

United Kingdom Census 2001

A nationwide census, known as Census 2001, was conducted in the United Kingdom on Sunday, 29 April 2001. This was the 20th UK Census and recorded a resident population of 58,789,194....

, Avonbridge had a population of 625 residents.

History

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Avonbridge was home to small scale open cast coal mining. The village also had a brickworks in the mid twentieth century, "Avonbridge Brickworks", but today no longer exists.
Nowadays the village is largely residential although Avonbridge is the base of operations for "Stevenson Brothers" a haulage company, whose bright orange heavy goods vehicles transport goods all over the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

.

Toponymy

The name Avonbridge derives from the fact that the village crosses a river. The affix

Affix

An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...

 "avon" is often found in the Celtic language which denotes the presence of a river, in this case the River Avon. This is found in Scottish Gaelic as "abhainn"; Droichaid Abhainne literally means Bridge of the River.