A drone survey firm covering Bideford

Bideford is about an hour and ten minutes from the Exeter base, on the A361 and then west. It is properly out, and this site would rather say so than list the town and leave the drive as a surprise on the day.

The way to make it work is to book it with something else. Barnstaple is fifteen minutes away, Great Torrington and the Northam and Appledore side are closer still, and a day covering three or four buildings in that area is a sensible use of the travel. Whatever the shape, travel sits inside the fixed price and the date is agreed in advance.

The old town rises very steeply from the quay on the east bank, with Georgian merchant houses on Bridgeland Street and tightly packed cottages climbing the hill behind. On streets like that, scaffold access is difficult in a way that goes beyond expense: there is often nowhere level to stand a tower, the pavement is too narrow to close without a licence, and neighbouring properties are close enough that any access affects somebody else.

That is the specific reason a survey here changes the arithmetic rather than just the method. Where getting somebody up to look costs more than the repair might, plenty of owners simply do not look, and the first they know about a problem is a ceiling. An aerial survey removes the access question entirely.

Slate hanging on exposed elevations is common, for the same reason it is at Launceston: driving rain. It comes with the same inspection difficulty and the same argument for photographing a face from level with it rather than from below.

The Torridge estuary carries Atlantic weather in from the west with salt on it, and the ground here is steep, which combines badly for anything mechanically fixed near a roof edge. Fixings corrode faster, wind uplift is higher on the exposed slopes above the quay, and the sheltered feeling of a narrow street at ground level is no guide at all to what the roof above it is experiencing.

That mismatch between how a street feels and what its roofs endure is one of the more useful things a survey can correct. Owners consistently underestimate exposure on tightly built hillside streets, and photographs of a ridge line taken from level with it settle the point quickly.

The Appledore shipyard side and Northam add larger structures and more open ground, where flying is easier and the buildings are bigger, which is a different job again on the same visit.

The quay and the Long Bridge carry the town's most photographed frontage and some of its most awkward buildings: tall, narrow, right on the water, with public space in front of them and no room behind. A launch position for anything on that row has to be chosen deliberately.

Northam Burrows and the estuary mouth beyond give a very different environment again, open and windy, where the buildings are lower and the exposure is higher.