A drone survey firm covering Totnes

Totnes is around thirty five minutes from the Exeter base, off the A38 rather than on it, which adds a few minutes to what the map suggests. It sits well with Newton Abbot, Paignton or Ivybridge in the same day, and for anyone with property here and in the wider South Hams, one booked visit covering several buildings is a better use of the travel than separate trips.

The town centre itself is a consideration for the drive as much as the flight. The main street is very steep and narrow, parking is limited, and a van needs somewhere sensible to sit. That is a planning detail rather than a problem, but it is one more reason a date here is agreed rather than improvised.

The historic centre is dense and old: medieval and Elizabethan buildings with slate-hung and jettied frontages, then Georgian and Victorian streets behind. Roofs in a core like that are not separate objects. They meet each other at party walls, they share valleys, they step up and down the hill in a run, and a great deal of the actual roof area belongs to a shape nobody drew deliberately.

Those tightly packed roofs have many hidden valleys and party-wall abutments that trap debris. A blocked valley between two listed buildings is a serious problem and an awkward one, because the water that overflows it goes into a wall shared by two owners and nobody can inspect it without access across somebody else's property.

From the air, the whole run can be photographed in one pass and the state of each valley read without asking a neighbour for anything. That is the specific reason this town is a good fit for drone survey work rather than a general one.

Slate hanging on elevations is common here and it is a covering with its own failure pattern: individual slipped slates on a vertical face, nail sickness in the fixings, and mortar at the edges giving up before the slate does. It is also very hard to inspect from below, because you are looking at it edge on.

The valley is damp and inland, sheltered compared with the coast but slow to dry, so the tightly packed historic roofs stay wet and the debris that collects in them stays wet too. That is what turns a partially blocked valley into a rotted timber over a few winters rather than a few decades.

The Dartington estate and the wider South Hams add larger properties and estate buildings to the local mix, where the instruction is often a full record of several structures at once rather than one roof with one symptom.

The Butterwalk and the other jettied, covered frontages on the main street are the part of the town where the roof above bears almost no relation to what a passer-by can see. Upper storeys overhang, rear slopes step back into a courtyard, and neighbouring properties meet at heights nobody has measured.

The castle mound gives a useful sense of how the roofs actually run when you look down on them, and that overhead view is exactly what a survey produces at a resolution you can work from.