PLANS have been approved to complete the restoration of a former opencast mine near Crossgates - 11 years after the operator went bust and abandoned the site.
A new wildlife pond will now be created at Muir Dean, south of the village, and soil and earth will be imported to fill in gaps, reprofile and raise the height of the land to ensure it's suitable for agricultural use.
A Fife Council report confirmed: "This application represents the final substantive act in completing the restoration of the former Muir Dean opencast coal site."
ATH Resources only got permission to extract coal after an appeal to the Scottish Government in 2007 and they went into liquidation following the collapse of Scottish Coal in 2013.
At the time Fife Council was worried that "ugly holes" would be left in the landscape at former mines including this one, and also Blair House at Oakley and St Ninians at Kelty, but the local authority did have the foresight to insist on financial bonds being put in place in case mining companies did go to the wall.
That money helped ensure "disturbed" land could be restored and the vast majority of the 225 hectares at Muir Dean has already been successfully brought back into productive use as farmland by Hargreaves, who picked up the pieces after ATH's financial ruin.
At the start of the work, a spokesman for the firm said that the firm's demise had left a local farmer, who owned land where part of the mine was, with "a hole in his back garden that was 45 metres deep and needed around three million tonnes of stone and earth to fill the void".
The current applicant, John Collier and Sons, of Blairadam, is set to finish the restoration. The last parcel of land is just under two hectares in size, near Elmbank Farm and Monziehall.
The scheme relates to the minewater treatment facility, which involved pumping polluted water out of the old Fordell Day Level and was part of ATH's original planning permission.
However, as the restoration of the site neared completion, the Coal Authority and SEPA decided that Muir Dean was "no longer the optimum location" to do this work.
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Instead they preferred to use the existing Pitfirrane minewater treatment facility at Crossford as the "most economic and environmentally appropriate approach" to the issue.
It meant the four minewater treatment lagoons at Muir Dean were no longer needed.
Two have been filled in and a council report explained: "This application is for the infilling of the third and fourth of those lagoons."
The engineering operation will see soils brought onto the site from groundworks projects across Fife and used to "upfill land at the base of the restoration mound left following the award-winning rehabilitation scheme" at Muir Dean.
It will raise the level of this land by up to two metres. As part of the work, Collier's said there will be 28 two-way HGV trips per day.
Council officers said this would pose no concern given that, when Muir Dean was operational and at its peak, there were 84 two-way HGV trips per day onto the B981 Inverkeithing Road.
Their report added: "The upfilling of this relatively small area of land will complete the whole site's rehabilitation, by softening the profile of the back edge of the restoration mound, allowing a safer and more complementary slope for normal farming operations carried out by tractor."
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