Caldercruix takes its name from cruiks - Scots for bends or crooks - in the North Calder Water, the river that runs through the village. The river itself was named for its calder (a Brittonic root meaning 'hard water' or 'rocky stream') flowing northwards before joining the Clyde. In the late 18th century landowners dammed the North Calder to create Hillend Loch, a reservoir that today serves anglers and small-boat sailors. The result is that a place named for the way a river wriggles now sits beside a flat sheet of standing water - the loch having tamed the cruiks for a good distance upstream. The village proper grew up around the river crossings, on what was originally Church of Scotland parish land that later acquired a Roman Catholic parish, Saint Mary's on Glen Road, as Irish workers arrived for the mills.

The Industrial Revolution found Caldercruix late but found it thoroughly. By the mid-19th century the village had a large paper mill drawing water from the North Calder and using local coal to fire its boilers. Papermaking and mining together gave Caldercruix its 19th-century population - workers' rows, a parish school, a church. The mill ran for more than a century before closing in 1970, taking with it the last of the village's heavy industry. The mining was gone before that, leaving subsidence and the standard Lanarkshire pattern of abandoned shafts. What remained was a village too small to be a town and too built-up to be quite rural, with two primary schools, a community council, and the kind of social cohesion that semi-rural Scotland is good at producing.

Caldercruix railway station was built in 1863 on the Bathgate and Coatbridge Railway, one of the small branch lines that knitted central Scotland together for the coal trade. It served passengers for almost a century before British Rail closed the line in January 1956 - one casualty among many of post-war rail rationalisation. Then in December 2010 the line reopened as the Airdrie–Bathgate rail link, restoring through services between Glasgow and Edinburgh by way of the old north Lanarkshire route. Three new stations opened with the line: Drumgelloch, Armadale, and Caldercruix. Except Caldercruix did not open with them. Bad weather - the freezing December of 2010 - delayed the platforms and signalling, and the station did not actually receive its first train until February 2011. After 54 years out of service, a few more weeks barely registered.

You Me at Six are a Surrey rock band who have never been particularly Scottish. Their lead singer Josh Franceschi, however, was once married to a woman from Caldercruix, and when their relationship ended he wrote 'Glasgow' for the 2021 album Suckapunch. The chorus mentions Caldercruix by name: 'Caldercruix called and said / that she don't want / the same thing.' For a village whose previous appearances in national culture had been limited to nineteenth-century industrial gazetteers, this counted as a moment. The locals took it in the usual Scottish way - with quiet amusement, a few jokes about whether the dame in question would care for the publicity, and a general willingness to be folded into the great archive of break-up songs that pop music keeps adding to. Hillend Loch carried on reflecting the sky regardless.