Coal & Allied wants to explore for coal under the dairy farms of Maison Dieu, a historic settlement between Muswellbrook and Singleton on the northern bank of the Hunter River.

Dairy farmer Charlie Shearer, who runs a Maison Dieu Road property with his son-in-law Russell Wenham, said the noise and dust from surrounding mines was already ‘‘unbelievable’’.

Maison Dieu, French for ‘‘house of God’’, was named in 1822 by settler James Dodds after a property in Scotland of the same name.

Mr Shearer, 76, said his family had been at Maison Dieu since 1895.

‘‘We put our roots down here, it’s our home,’’ Mr Shearer said.

‘‘Why would we want to move? Why should we be chased out? We were here before the mines.’’

Coal & Allied says all of its bore holes will be ‘‘above the level of the alluvial land’’, but the Minewatch group is still unhappy with the plan.

Minewatch president Wendy Bowman, from nearby Camberwell, said a Maison Dieu mine, along with the proposed Ashton South East open-cut, would leave her village surrounded.

While protests about mining near valuable horse studs in the Upper Hunter prompted the O’Farrell government to introduce a 60-day moratorium on new exploration licences, the Maison Dieu exploration can go ahead as it has pre-existing approval.

A Coal & Allied spokesman said the state government had recently renewed the company’s exploration licence for Maison Dieu, in an area across the Hunter River from its existing Hunter Valley Operations South mine.

The spokesman said the company would work with landowners to minimise the impacts of drilling.

“In this case, all of the boreholes that are designed to test coal will be sited above the level of the alluvial land,’’ the spokesman said.

Mr Shearer said the once-robust Singleton dairy industry had been all but decimated as the mines bought up successive waves of agricultural land.

But mining was a double-edged sword.

Mr Shearer also owns a takeaway food shop in the Maison Dieu industrial area, where he makes most of his money from customers working in the coal industry.

Mrs Bowman said the expansion of open-cut mining had pushed native animals into the corridor between Camberwell and the Hunter River, increasing the environmental value of the farms and remnant bushland.