Bellshill

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This article is about the town in North Lanarkshire, Scotland. For other places of the same name, see Bellshill (disambiguation).

St Andrew's Church, Bellshill

Bellshill is a town in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, two miles north of Motherwell. Since 1996 it has been situated in the Greater Glasgow metropolitan area. The town has a population of 20,705 (2001).

The earliest record of settlement in the Bellshill area is a village called Belmill, recorded on a map by Timothy Pont published in 1654. The village consisted of a row of quarry workers' houses owned by Mr. Bell, who owned a stone quarry to the south of Belmill. After the quarry closed, the village disappeared and a settlement developed nearby called Crossgates. About 1810, this new settlement took on the name Bellshill and continued to grow absorbing nearby villages such as Black Moss and Sykehead.

After the mid-1800s, large coal and iron deposits were discovered nearby and a number of mines opened, the first being the Thankerton mine. This rapidly increased the size of the town, even bringing in immigrants from abroad (particularly Lithuania).

A number of railway stations were opened in the area, including Mossend, Fallside and Bell Cross.

In the 1870s, infection diseases. In 1917, the hospital began to specialise as a maternity hospital, the first in the Lanarkshire area, with new dedicated maternity buildings being opened in 1958 and 1962. The hospital was also the first in the world to have an 'Obstetric Flying Squad'. The hospital was the birth place of many famous faces including politician Robin Cook. footballer Ally McCoist and singer Sheena Easton. The hospital later closed down in 2001 and was demolished in 2003 to make way for new housing developments. According to a report by the Halifax Building Society in the first quarter of 2005 Bellshill was the UKs property hotspot with a 46% rise in house prices. This took the average property price to £105,698 (according to reports published April 2005).

[edit] Etymology

Bellshill has an uncertain etymology. Some toponymists suggest the origin may be Celtic baile "town" with an unknown second element, while others suggest it is Old English hyll "hill" with an uncertain first element. The name was recorded as Balenhulle in 1278, suggesting a mixture of Old English and Celtic, but currently, there is no proper etymology.

Along with both Airdrie and Coatbridge, Bellshill shares a passion for Buckfast Tonic Wine being part of these three places for the highest percentage of Buckfast sales in the country.^{[citation needed]}