By Shirley English

AS GLENEAGLES Hotel prepares to play host to the G8 summit of world leaders this summer, residents in the nearby town of Auchterarder fear the worst.

This genteel town high in the Perthshire hills with a population of just 4,000 is a world away from the urban sprawl of Seattle and Genoa where previous summits have been disrupted by violent anti-capitalist protests. Yet the talk in Auchterarder is of battening down the hatches as «violent anarchists» trash the tearooms, boutiques and antiques emporiums that line its picturepostcard high street.

PC Fraser White, the G8 community liaison officer for Tayside police, has heard it all. As he cycles round town, they ask him when the riot police with water cannons are coming and where the SAS will be staked out.

One agitated elderly gentleman asked if it was true that rocket launchers were to be sited in his front garden as a security precaution against a terrorist attack. And a curious schoolboy wondered if he would be shot if he attempted to climb the perimeter fence soon to be erected around Gleneagles' 850-acre grounds.

On the face of it, there is little here to interest anticapitalist activists intent on striking a blow against multinational corporations.

McDonald's may have made it to Moscow, but not Auchterarder, or «the Lang Toon», as locals call it, because of the mile-long high street. Although traders boast that people come from Glasgow and Edinburgh to shop, the biggest name in the high street is the Co-op.

«There is no street cred for protesters in trashing a local pie shop,» PC White says, although he is painfully aware that the reassurances of a G8 bobby on a bicycle with a truncheon are failing to quell the worst fears. Townsfolk remain unconvinced by protest organisers who insist that violence will not be welcome at the 50,000-strong march outside Gleneagles Hotel when the summit opens on July 6.

Although tourism chiefs say the event will attract plenty of revenue and put the town on the map, for many it means at best inconvenience and loss of business, at worst their town laid waste. It is difficult to imagine how the place will cope with the influx of up to 65,000 people, including 10,000 police and 3,000 journalists.

There are plenty of cafés, as well as a Chinese and an Indian restaurant, who hope business will be brisk. But the free car park has just forty spaces and there are only six public lavatories. Hotels and B&Bs are fully booked for miles around.

Some boutique owners are seriously considering bringing down the shutters and heading for the hills. Eleanor Aitken, at her parents' shoe shop, D & R Johnston, which has served the town for generations, said: «I am not expecting Mrs Blair to pop down from the hotel to buy a pair of shoes.

«We don't even know if it will be safe to open. What if a brick comes through the window? The police tell us nothing. We'll lose a week's trade because of this and our insurance will go up, but we've been told there's no compensation.»

Tony Blair is said to have chosen Gleneagles Hotel because of its remoteness, an odd assessment of a place just 45 minutes from Edinburgh airport.

«He's obviously never been here. We're on a dual carriageway and a railway line. We're hardly remote,» Peter Everett, the community council chairman, says, chuckling at the Prime Minister's poor geography.

«If they wanted remoteness why not meet on an aircraft carrier at sea, not here? But then, no one asked our opinion.»

Tayside police admit that normal life will be disrupted. Some road closures are inevitable and residents living near the hotel will require security passes to come and go from their own front doors.