Drone survey in Salcombe

Alongside the Victorian and Edwardian villas and the dense old core near the harbour, Salcombe has a large number of contemporary architect-designed houses with flat roofs, zinc and standing seam metal, big glazed elements and roof terraces.

Those details are demanding anywhere and they are demanding here in particular, because wind-driven rain arrives horizontally. A flat roof upstand, a terrace threshold, a glazing junction and a metal seam all depend on being detailed correctly and staying that way. They also tend to be at the top of a building that is already at the top of a hill.

The town is stacked up a hillside above the mouth of the Kingsbridge estuary with cliffs at Bolt Head to the west, and it is fully open to the south and to salt. Exposure is not an occasional storm event here, it is the ordinary condition.

The gradient compounds it. Access equipment on ground that steep is expensive and sometimes impossible, and a great many Salcombe roofs have simply never been inspected since they were built because nobody could work out how to get to them economically.

A large share of the stock is second homes and holiday lets, which means buildings stand empty for long periods. A defect that would be noticed in a week in an occupied house can run for a season here, and water gets a long time to do its work before anybody sees a mark on a ceiling.

That is the strongest local argument for a periodic aerial record. An hour once a year on a building that is empty for eight months of it is a cheap way of catching something early, and it can be done without anybody being there beyond opening a gate.

The harbour and the estuary give good open approaches, so elevations facing the water are usually straightforward. The inland faces are harder, because the properties above are close and the ground rises fast.

Take off ground is the usual planning question. Driveways here are often steep and short, and a level position with nothing overhead frequently has to be borrowed from a neighbour or found further up the lane.

The lanes running down to North Sands and South Sands are narrow, steep and busy in season, and the houses along them are often on ground that falls away sharply behind the road. That combination makes conventional access unusually awkward even by the standards of this coast.

For a TQ8 property in that position the practical planning question is simply where the aircraft can stand. Sometimes the answer is a passing place, sometimes a neighbour's drive, and sometimes the only sensible option is to work from above the property rather than below it.

Overbeck's and the ground towards Bolt Head give a sense of how quickly the terrain rises, and properties up there are effectively cliff top buildings in terms of what the weather does to them.