Drone services in Crediton

Thatch is the thing that makes Crediton different from most of the towns on this list. The ridge on a thatched roof is the part that wears out first, it is the most expensive part to get wrong, and it is completely invisible from the ground because it sits at the very top of a steeply pitched, soft, unwalkable surface.

Nobody puts a ladder on thatch. So the choice used to be a scaffold or a guess, and photographs from above have quietly replaced both. A close set of frames shows the state of the ridge, the wire netting, where the coatwork has thinned and whether moss has taken hold on the north pitch, which is enough for a master thatcher to price properly rather than by eye from a gateway.

There is a seasonal edge to it as well. Ridges are usually replaced on a cycle measured in decades rather than years, so the useful question is not whether one has failed but how much of the cycle is left, and that is a judgement a thatcher makes from close photographs far more reliably than from a description over the phone.

The Creedy valley carries some of the most productive farmland in Devon, and that means a hinterland of farmhouses, barn conversions and working agricultural buildings with corrugated metal roofs. Those sheds are big, low value per square metre and almost never inspected, which is why the first anyone knows about a corroded sheet is a leak over machinery.

One flight can cover an entire yard: every shed roof, the state of the gutters between them, the yard drainage and the tracks in and out. For a farm business that is a very different proposition from paying somebody to walk a roof they should not really be walking on.

The town itself is a long Georgian and Victorian high street with slate and stone tile above it, sitting in a valley between steep red sandstone hills. Atlantic weather comes in from the west with very little to break it, and the valley holds the damp afterwards.

The predictable result is heavy growth on anything facing north. Moss holds water against the slate, the tail of a slate lifts, and the fixing behind it goes. It is slow and it is cheap to catch early, and the only difficult part has always been seeing it.

Stone tile turns up here too, on older outlying buildings, and it behaves differently again. It is heavy, it is bedded rather than nailed, and a single displaced tile puts load somewhere the roof was never designed to carry it, so spotting one early is worth more than it sounds.

Property here often comes with acreage, and acreage sells on shape and access rather than on a photograph of the front door. A top-down set showing the whole holding, the field boundaries and the track in from the lane does more for a rural listing than any number of interior shots.

Boundary questions come up for the same reason. Devon hedge banks move, get grubbed out, get replanted in a slightly different line, and photographs of what is physically on the ground are a useful thing for a solicitor to sit alongside the deeds, even though they settle nothing on their own.