MINING is Scotland's oldest industry and at its height more than 40 million tons of coal was produced each year.

By the early 1900s nearly 150,000 people were directly employed in the mining industry in Scotland.

In 1957 the coal industry employed 87,000 men and after the Second World War had 187 collieries across three coalfields.

The last deep mine in Scotland, Longannet in Fife, went into liquidation in 2002, when 400 miners and 150 contractors lost their jobs, after 17 million gallons of water flooded the shaft.

In 2013 Scottish Coal collapsed making 650 people redundant and marking the end of a mining era.

The new research found 43 per cent of all neighbourhoods in the coalfields fall into the most deprived 30 per cent in the country, while in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire the figure is 50 per cent, in Fife 45 per cent and Lothian 23 per cent.

In the UK 250,000 coal jobs have gone since the 1980s.