Drone survey in Holsworthy

The parishes around Holsworthy carry a very large proportion of working farms, barns and agricultural sheds, and corrugated metal and fibre cement are as common as slate. That stock is the reason most aerial survey work here happens.

An agricultural roof is large, old, in use below and dangerous to walk on. Fibre cement in particular becomes fragile with age and should not carry weight. Photographing a whole yard from above in a morning, with a record of each building, is both safer and cheaper than getting one person safely onto any of them.

This is heavy clay country on the Culm Measures plateau, and access for plant and scaffold is poor for much of the winter. A telehandler or a scaffold lorry on a soft yard in January is either impossible or expensive, and often both.

An aircraft is indifferent to that. It needs a few square metres of firm ground to sit on, which a yard or a gateway provides even in a wet month, and it does not need to reach the building at all. That is the strongest practical argument for aerial inspection anywhere in this coverage area.

There is nothing between this plateau and the Atlantic, so it is wet and windy on an ordinary basis rather than occasionally. Buildings here are worked hard, and the exposed farm structures on open ground take sustained loading rather than gusts.

The recurring findings are consistent: sheet fixings that have worked loose, ridge caps lifted, translucent sheets gone brittle and opaque, and gutters that stopped functioning some time ago.

A modest Victorian and Georgian centre with terraced and detached cottages and post-war estates makes up the town, and those are ordinary domestic survey subjects. The viaduct and Stanhope Park are useful reference points.

The Tamar Lakes and the Cornish border are a few miles west, so work here often runs across into Cornwall in the same trip.

Holsworthy serves a large rural area that runs west to the Tamar Lakes and the Cornish border, and a good share of the work here is spread across several properties on one holding rather than concentrated on a single building.

That suits a fixed price arrangement. An EX22 address with a farmhouse, two barns and a modern shed is quoted as one visit, and the record covers all four, which is a different proposition from paying four times for four separate inspections.

Stanhope Park and the town itself are conventional by comparison, with terraced and detached cottages and post-war estates that behave like any other small Devon town. It is the surrounding parishes that make this area unusual.