PEOPLE in north Durham who oppose plans to excavate 450,000 tonnes of coal from the countryside are forming an action group.

Thirty-eight people attended Dipton Community Partnership's meeting at the village community centre on Saturday.

It was called in response to UK Coal carrying out a scoping exercise to assess the impact of opencasting the Bradley site.

Partnership secretary Brenda Bell said: "We are organising a petition to put in shops and post offices to make people aware of what is being discussed.

"If a planning application is submitted, we will start a letter-writing campaign to let the council know how we feel about this.

"People round here know we live in a beautiful area and this is how we want it to stay.

"We are going to work with the people from Leadgate, Medomsley and Burnopfield who attended to make our feelings known."

A scoping exercise is a list of things that Durham County Council think should to be considered and taken into account as part of any planning application, such as likely noise and dust levels, and impact on the environment.

It is one of the first steps towards submitting an official planning application for permission to mine the land.

A council spokesman said: "The site in question, the Bradley site, is, to a very large extent, owned by UK Coal and is one of the areas of land in County Durham proposed by them as being a potential opencast site in November 2005.

"If or when an application is made, it will be treated like any other application, including advance publicity in the press and on-site.

"A wide range of consultees will also be asked for comments."

UK Coal spokesman Stuart Oliver said the Bradley site contains a special form of coking coal used in steel production.

The British steel industry currently has to import it from Russia and South Africa because there is none available in the UK.

Mr Oliver said a full public consultation exercise would be carried out before any decision was made.

The company is expected to complete an operation to remove 250,000 tonnes of coal from the Stony Heap site, near Leadgate by autumn.