In May, the Angus Cereal Partnership announced plans for the £14 million facility, which would be built adjacent to the Glenesk Maltings building in the village and which would process 90,000 tonnes of cereals per year.

During its peak at harvest time, the facility would be visited by 12 to 13 lorries per hour during an estimated 14 hour day. Access to the site would be via the Kinnaber Road junction with the A937.

But since a public meeting to discuss the plan was held at Hillside Community Council in May, a petition has been organised by worried locals to make their point of view known.

The group have already collected 400 signatures – nearly half the population of the village. The person behind it, Caroline Kerr of Sinclair Gardens, said she and those who signed the petition also plan to submit individual formal objections to the scheme should a planning application be submitted to Angus Council.

She said: "It's just yards away from homes and there are a lot of reasons as to why people aren't happy with the site.

"They admitted at the public meeting that there is no other facility like this as close to a residential area in the UK – so why here? I think it's something that should be in the middle of nowhere because it will be disruptive."

The concerns the residents have over the proposal is that dust from the site would exacerbate conditions such as asthma and hayfever, the silos would have a significant visual impact and therefore affect house prices, that the road structure in the village isn't good enough to cope with the heavy volume of traffic that it would generate, and that the increase in traffic would pose an increased risk to pedestrians.

They are also worried that the road structure would come under more strain when Sunnyside Hospital is re-developed as housing, that the increased volume of traffic would lead to an higher risk of diesel spillage and that the four jobs that would potentially be created by the proposal would only be seasonal.

Marion and George Mustard, who have lived at Sinclair Gardens for 10 years, were two of the first people to sign the petition. They said they couldn't understand the need for the facility in Hillside and said the possibility of the facility just a few hundred yards from their home would not be welcome.

It is expected that the petition will be completed within the next two weeks, when it will then be forwarded to the town's four councillors, Angus MSP Andrew Welsh, north east MSP Alex Johnstone and Hillside Community Council.