Drone survey in Ottery St Mary

The centre around the church carries Georgian and Victorian frontages, and the lanes around it hold cob and thatch survivals, with post-war and modern estates spreading north and west. That mixture means two quite different survey conversations in one small town.

On a cob building the roof is doing structural work as well as keeping rain out, because cob relies on staying dry. A failed gutter or a slipped slate above a cob wall is a more serious matter than the same defect above a brick one, and the timescale for putting it right is shorter.

The town sits in the Otter valley on gently rolling ground between the Blackdown Hills and the coast eight miles south. It is inland and reasonably sheltered, but the valley floor holds mist and damp, so moss and lichen establish quickly on shaded slopes and in valleys.

The practical version of that is simple: north-facing slopes here need looking at more often than south-facing ones, and the difference between the two on the same building can be striking in a photograph taken on the same morning.

St Mary's is a large and complex historic roof, and the buildings around it inherit some of the same conditions: tall stacks, deep valleys, lead work and an awkward relationship between old fabric and later repairs.

Flights near the church are planned rather than improvised, and any work of that kind is coordinated with whoever is responsible for the building. For domestic properties nearby the church simply provides a useful visual reference for orientation in the images.

Ottery is comfortable to work in. Plots are reasonable, the ground is gentle, and there is farmland close by on every side. The Tumbling Weir and the water course through the town are features to keep clear of rather than obstacles.

Being inland, the weather window is wider here than on the coast, so a date is more likely to hold than one booked for Exmouth in the same week.

Around Ottery there are properties reached by lanes that will not take a large vehicle, and buildings like Cadhay House give an idea of the scale of some of the older houses in the surrounding countryside.

A single track lane is a genuine obstacle to conventional access. A scaffold lorry cannot get down it, a tower has to be carried, and the cost of reaching a roof at all can exceed the cost of whatever is wrong with it. An aircraft arrives in the boot of a car and takes off from a field gate.

That is the practical reason a rural EX11 address is often a better candidate for aerial survey than a house on a main road in the town centre, even though the town house is nearer and easier to find.