HALF of Scotland's largest city is affected by disused mine workings that have been left over from its industrial past, say geologists.

A survey commissioned by Glasgow City Council, which has embarked on a major project to fill in the disused shafts, has mapped out the extent to which areas of the city are undermined.

This week, residents of Jordanhill, one of the city's most desirable neighbourhoods, were told it will cost up to £5000 each to pay for mines that crisscross the area to be filled in.

Work is due to start next year after engineers examined data from boreholes that showed the mines, some of which date back centuries, could collapse.

A large part of Govanhill, on the south side of the city, has already been underpinned after concerns were raised about the safety of mineworkings there.

Diarmad Campbell, chief geologist for Scotland at the British Geological Survey, has been working with the local authority to identify the extent of tunnels beneath the city.

He said: "We have been running a project with Glasgow City Council to model the underground of the city in 3D. The model extends to Paisley in the west and Motherwell in the east.

"Half the city is undermined by some form of mine or other. Mining in the city was mostly for coal and ironstone, although it was also done for limestone and sandstone, materials you would normally quarry."

Mr Campbell said many of the communities that came to make up the greater Glasgow area grew up independently around mines that were later swallowed up by the city's urban sprawl.

He said: "Much of the eastern conurbation is undermined by mines, and there are pockets in the south and west of the city. The mines vary from being very shallow to extending 250 to 300 metres below the ground. At Stepps there are mines which are 600 metres deep."

Glasgow City Council engineers discovered around 100 houses in Jordanhill have been built on unstable mine shafts when they carried out drilling tests last year.

Officials at the Geotechnical and Land Remediation Department have had to come up with a "cost-effective" way of filling in the underground cavities.

The design has now been finalised and will involve digging a grid of boreholes through roads and gardens and then "raking" the space below the houses.

It is expected the work will take around six months to complete, and will cost in the region of £1 million.

The roads affected are Munro Road, Austen Road, Borden Road, and Chamberlain Road. Work will also be carried out to restore gardens and roads to original condition once work is done.

Local historian Brian Skillen has found plans showing that Glasgow's mineworkings date back to the 1690s.

However, keeping records on the exact location of new mines was made mandatory only in the 1870s.

A spokesman for Glasgow City Council said the local authority had not yet decided which other areas will have to be filled in, and that the project to identify danger spots is "ongoing".

He said: "As part of the council's city-wide mineral investigation programme, part of Jordanhill was identified as potentially at risk from the collapse of shallow abandoned mineworkings.

"Funding was identified which allowed the council's Geotechnical and Land Remediation Team to carry out a comprehensive investigation of the condition of the mineworkings in the winter of 2011. The report concluded that over 100 properties were at risk of damage should the roadways within the mineworkings collapse."