Drone survey in Kingsbridge

Kingsbridge carries Georgian and Victorian townhouses up the hill, with slate-hung and rendered cottages among them and farmhouses across the surrounding South Hams. Slate hanging on dormers and walls is a local habit, and like everywhere it uses it, the covering both protects and conceals.

What a survey looks for on hung slate is movement rather than damage: a course that has slipped, a dormer cheek where the slates have opened, a nail sickness pattern where a whole run has begun to sag. Those show clearly in a photograph taken level with the detail and not at all from a street twenty feet below it.

The estuary shelters the town from the open sea, but salt air still arrives on southerly gales, and the steep, tightly packed streets create turbulence around chimneys and dormers. Wind that would pass over a building on open ground instead swirls between buildings here.

That is hard on the projecting parts. Chimney stacks, dormer cheeks, ridge ends and any flashing at a change of level are the things that work loose, and they are all above the eaves line where nobody is looking.

Enquiries here split between the town itself and the farms and barn conversions in the surrounding South Hams. Those are a different job again: large spans, corrugated or profiled coverings, and buildings that are worth surveying as a group rather than one at a time.

The tidal creek system to the south is useful for flying. There is open water and open ground close to the town, which gives sensible approaches, though tide and mud dictate where an aircraft can actually stand near the water.

Fore Street is a difficult place to put up a scaffold and a costly place to close a lane. That is the everyday reason people here look at aerial photography first: it answers whether there is a problem at all before anybody commits to the access that a repair would need.

For a farm group the calculation is similar but at a different scale. Flying six buildings in a morning and getting a captioned record of each is cheaper than getting a person safely onto any one of them.

The town sits at the head of the estuary and the tide governs a good deal of what happens at the quay end. That matters for flying only in so far as it decides where an aircraft can safely stand near the water, but it is worth checking before arranging a morning.

For a TQ7 property up Fore Street the more useful point is that the buildings behind the frontage often extend a long way back and downhill, so the roof arrangement is more complicated than the street elevation suggests.

The South Hams countryside around the town brings the usual rural work with it, and a farm group and a town house are commonly booked in the same trip because travel is inside the fixed price.