PLANS are in place to complete the restoration of the former opencast coal site at Muir Dean, near Crossgates.

John Collier and Sons, a family firm involved in agriculture, land improvement, haulage and plant hire, now own the land and have submitted proposals to Fife Council.

The application is one of the final chapters in a controversial story where a mining firm, ATH Resources, fought a long battle to take coal from the land, finally winning an appeal with the Scottish Government only to go bust a few years later.

The Collier plans to bring the land back into agricultural use involve transporting more than 15,000 tonnes of soil onto the site to spread over a former drying lagoon.

Just under an acre in size, it was previously used as part of the coaling operations and the timescale for the reinstatement works would be 18 months.

A planning statement on their behalf said: "The former opencast site has been restored with the land returned to grazing together with a pond which comprises mine water, tracks formed for the public to walk along and a number of redundant settlement lagoons.

"The whole site has been fenced and gated to contain the sheep which graze on the site."

It added: "The restoration of this small part of the site would complete the site with the opportunity for further grazing land being available and completing the land-profiling of this area of the site."

A bond of more than £7 million was made available for restoration works after ATH went into administration in 2013.

Their plans to extract two million tonnes of coal from the site over four-and-a-half years had been refused by Fife Council.

The decision was later overturned on appeal by the Scottish Government with operations starting in the Spring of 2008.

ATH went bust and Hargreaves Surface Mining Ltd was contracted to restore the site in November 2013.

At one stage, the farmer who owns Annfield Farm, where part of the mine was located, was "left with a hole in his back garden that was 45 metres deep and needed around three million tonnes of overburden (stone and earth) to fill the void".

Hargreaves continued to restore land and mine coal on the site until early 2016, when the impending closure of Longannet Power Station led to operations ceasing.

It was a jobs blow for workers and was described as a "historically significant time", marking the end of major coal extraction in Fife.

It also meant that work to focus solely on the restoration of the land started sooner than originally expected.

After picking up the pieces in the wake of Scottish Coal going bust, Hargreaves also restored the St Ninian's opencast coal site, near Kelty, which was completed in 2015.