A worrying number of houses are built on top of coalfields. So as a housing estate is evacuated over fears it is sinking into old mines: Could YOUR home be at risk of falling into the abyss?

Published: 17:17, 5 June 2026 | Updated: 17:17, 5 June 2026 When Marc Payoyo was roused early from his slumbers, it was not the sultry night that had disturbed his sleep but the worried-sounding voices outside his open window. He and his family had not long moved into their immaculate three-bedroom home in the former mining village of Coalsnaughton.  But they had lived there long enough to know that level of early-morning activity was unusual. After coming downstairs, he headed into the kitchen: ‘I went to the back door and noticed it was really hard to open and close compared with the night before,’ Mr Payoyo recalled. ‘Suddenly, I noticed a big crack in our back yard and I started to panic. ‘Other neighbours had spotted cracks at 3am, which is why by six o’clock there were lots of commotions outside. ‘Our house, that day, there were small cracks already inside and outside, although not as terrible as it is now…’ Houses were evacuated in Coalsnaughton, Clackmannanshire (shown in the graphic below) Your browser does not support iframes. What Mr Payoyo was witnessing was the slow, steady pulling apart of the house he and his wife Jaarni had bought just four months earlier for them and their three young children. The property on Dunmoss View, part of a pristine development of new-builds known as The Glen on a rejuvenated brownfield site in the Clackmannanshire village, was meant to be their forever home. But their world – and their house – began to fall apart on that nightmarish day in late May. The Payoyos were not the first family to be affected. Ten days earlier, on May 18, the entire street in front of theirs, Benbuck View, was closed off and 30 properties were evacuated after paving slabs buckled and cracks appeared in buildings. The Payoyos and their neighbours followed on May 27, when worried authorities told the residents of all 30 properties in Dunmoss View to leave amid fresh reports of ground movement. Villagers given minutes to grab their belongings raced between house and car carrying everything they could lay hands on, from clothing to laptops, air fryers to curling tongs, before fleeing, leaving behind furniture, televisions and beds. Some would speak of struggling to open front doors and hearing strange creaking noises; others watched skirting boards come away from walls while front paths ‘buckled up’ and parts of the road started ‘separating’.  Days later, fresh pandemonium erupted when a further 28 homes were evacuated on Nechtan Drive at the top of the estate and nine in Langour at the bottom – taking the total number to 97. Villagers were given just minutes to grab their belongings and evacuate The fear is that much of the development, which sits on a steeply sloping site on top of former mineworkings, is steadily and inexorably sliding downhill. The result? Hundreds of people displaced, they and their homes abandoned to who knows what fate. Their ‘sinking village’ was raised at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday where Sir Keir Starmer was told of devastated residents’ ‘severe emotional and financial distress’ by local MP Brian Leishman. Earlier, at a meeting with mining experts, those evacuated learned of the remorseless speed and scale of the forces intent on destroying their lives. The ground in parts of the estate, they were told, continues to shift by between 10 and 15mm a day, every day. When one considers that Venice is sinking at a rate of around 1 to 2mm per year – and that is treated as an international emergency – it brings a sobering perspective to the plight of the people of Coalsnaughton. Engineers from the Mining Remediation Authority (MRA) also told the meeting it could be another eight weeks before they can work out what the root cause of this continuous movement is. It is, perhaps, significant that the MRA, the government agency which deals with legacy issues relating to our mining past, is leading those investigations amid fears old mineshafts have made the area unsafe.  Maps show one 150-year-old shaft lies directly underneath a front drive in Dunmoss View – just yards from the Payoyos’ home. That ‘capped’ shaft appears on a flashy interactive database on the MRA’s website, which exposes the honeycomb of coalfields that have pitted Scotland’s industrial heartlands down the centuries and pinpoints the location of every disused mineshaft.  Dunmoss View resident Marc Payoyo has been forced out of his home Or, at least, the ones that the MRA knows about, as many historic mines were never properly recorded. Worryingly, the website reveals ‘that 51 per cent of properties in Scotland are located on coalfields’, most of which are concentrated in the heavily congested Central Belt, where roughly 70 per cent of the country’s 5.4million population live. If this stark statistic doesn’t strike a chord with most of us, it really should. For the people of Coalsnaughton are not the first to suffer the anguish of being forced from their homes in such circumstances. Sinkholes and subsidence caused by mining are commonplace. The only question is: who might be next? For Mr Payoyo, 40, the anguish is still raw. He and his wife, 37, both care home nurses, only moved into their £192,000 home in mid-February. ‘There’s been a lot of heartache for us; we’ve only just finished redecorating the house and were expecting my wife’s family to visit from the US,’ he said. Sadly, they don’t know when – or even if – they will be back home themselves. ‘The loss adjuster called yesterday and said our house has been severely damaged. There are cracks everywhere and some you feel you can see the foundations,’ Mr Payoyo added. ‘My wife and I were quite emotional. I am already sure in the back of my mind that we cannot go back there any more. ‘In the house, if you put a tin can down in our kitchen at the back door, it will roll down to the front door because the house is so tilted already. It’s tilted as if it’s heading downhill.’ For now, the family are living out of suitcases in a Stirling townhouse sourced by their insurers. The council has arranged transport for their children to continue attending the same schools, but the couple’s commutes to work have doubled. And even if the insurers do decide to write off the house, Mr Payoyo fears that they could struggle to get back on the property ladder: ‘It’s really hard to find a three-bedroomed house we can afford at the moment, even to rent. There’s so many worries floating around our mind just now. ‘The Glen is a beautiful area and we felt very settled. The neighbourhood was a playground for the kids, so everybody is very sad. My wee boy loves his playmates and really misses them.’ A number of the homes are social housing operated by Kingdom Housing Association.  Aaron Anderson, 36, was forced to quit his rented home in Nechtan Drive, after the gas supply was switched off for safety reasons.  He and wife Megan and their three daughters are now in a short-term let in Grangemouth, Stirlingshire. Other families have been taken in by relatives and friends, with some being put up in hotels. ‘It’s a nightmare,’ Mr Anderson said. ‘It’s so surreal. You don’t think these things will happen to you. One minute you are in your house and everyone is happy under this cosy roof everyone calls home, and then by the end of the day you’re in a completely different house with different surroundings in a totally different town that’s a 29-minute drive away from your actual home.’ Ironically, barely a 30-minute drive from Coalsnaughton is the Fife town of Kincardine, where in May last year, residents watched in tears after bulldozers flattened six homes in Dewar Avenue deemed unsafe after the MRA confirmed cracks in the walls were the result of subsidence from old mining works. Structural assessments found the houses were beyond repair and, a year on, the MRA continues to monitor the street for further movement. Such stories stretch from one side of the country to the other. In late 2024, a hidden 120-metre mineshaft collapsed in an elderly couple’s back garden in a former coal town in North Lanarkshire. It took the MRA three months to pump in 1,700kg of resin through carefully drilled boreholes to safely fill the mine. In 2017, historic mine workings were found to have caused the collapse of part of Kilbowie Road in Clydebank, West Dunbartonshire, opening up a 60 metre-deep cavity. The people of Coalsnaughton are not the first to suffer the anguish of being forced from their homes in such circumstances In all cases the MRA, which already manages £3.7 billion in mining liabilities as the government body responsible, has picked up the tab for repairs and compensation.  It would pay the bill at The Glen, too, should it be determined that old mines are at fault. Until then, a multi-agency taskforce based at the Devonvale Hall in Tillicoultry and led by Clackmannanshire Council is co-ordinating help for displaced residents to navigate the mountains of red tape they face sorting mortgages, rent, utility bills, work, schools and benefits. The council has already announced a two-month council tax freeze for those affected and appeals have been made to both Westminster and Holyrood for emergency financial assistance. Clackmannanshire Council chief executive Nikki Bridle, meanwhile, has insisted: ‘The priority continues to be the safety of everyone involved.’ Only a tour of Coalsnaughton can bring home the all-encompassing impact of this full-blown crisis. Staff at the corner shop on Main Street have seen ‘how quiet the place has become’. What is also remarkable is just how steeply The Glen, also the name of the main road leading down past the stricken homes on the estate, falls away to the River Devon below. Ironically, a private builder is currently building a six-bedroom home on a separate plot at the top of the road. It seems incongruous. Meanwhile, The Glen remains closed off to traffic as squads of hard-hatted surveyors and mining engineers march about with calibrated instruments taking fresh measurements from yellow plastic discs screwed into the ground. In Simpson Drive, separated from the sinking estate by a natural tree-filled gorge, one resident recalled how contractors spent weeks filling and levelling the ground ready for the new development. ‘I don’t know what they used to fill it with, but whatever it was, our windows were covered in black dust for weeks,’ she said. ‘Everyone round here remembers the planning getting knocked back several times before it was approved, but I’ve no idea why. ‘Developers still want to build on the open land below us where there used to be clay pits and a tile works. I’ll be amazed if they get it passed after all this. But then, some of us were surprised when they got permission for The Glen.’ Much of the housing estate in Coalsnaughton has been closed off   Certainly, concerns about mine workings are mentioned in documents lodged at various points in the planning process. They include a ground stability report prepared by the Coal Authority (forerunner to the MRA) in 2007, which said the area was in the ‘likely zone of influence from workings in two seams of coal at shallow to 50m depth and last worked in 1875’. A separate layout plan shows the presence of the 1875 shaft underneath a shared driveway at the end of Dunmoss View. The 2007 report points out that mine records ‘may be incomplete’, adding that ‘there may exist in the local area mine entries of which the Coal Authority has no knowledge’. The report states: ‘No notice of the land being affected by subsidence has been given under section 46 of the Coal Mining Subsidence Act 1991.’ However, it highlights the area is underlain by clay, which can swell or shrink according to moisture content, and sand which can start to flow if it comes into contact with water. In other words, climatic conditions could alter the risk of ground movement. Certainly, our changing climate may prove to be a factor, according to Andrew Farrant, a geologist at the British Geological Survey. Cycles of deepening drought and heavy rain can trigger the kind of movement that causes the collapse of former mines, shafts, wells and sewers, triggering sinkholes and subsidence. In some cases, closed mines were poorly capped, sometimes with earth piled up on timber that was liable to rot and give way. ‘There’s definitely a link between heavy rainfall and the likely occurrence of sinkholes, but we don’t know how many occur, partly because many just don’t get recorded,’ said Mr Farrant. The 2007 report adds that the site’s ‘local geology and steepness of slope could combine to create the likelihood of landslide activity’, although it suggests such activity is ‘unlikely to occur’. And yet, almost 100 homes have now had to be evacuated less than 20 years after they were built. Intriguingly, when the final tranche of the development was being discussed by the council, a report to the planning committee on August 25, 2016, stated: ‘The Coal Authority: Objection. Additional information required on precise location of previously stabilised and capped mineshaft in relation to the proposed development layout. This has now been provided and the objection has been withdrawn’. In a statement posted last week, Clackmannanshire Council said: ‘Investigation works were carried out under a Coal Authority permit to investigate and treat historic mining risks. A specialist contractor completed the ground stabilisation works, and follow-up testing confirmed the ground had been successfully stabilised.’ Why it should now have become destabilised may only be made clear once the MRA concludes its investigation. By then, of course, the residents of Coalsnaughton’s ‘sinking estate’ may see their hopes, like their homes, slowly swallowed up by the shifting earth. No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. 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