Drone services in Holsworthy

A very large proportion of the property around Holsworthy is working farms: barns, sheds, cattle housing and grain stores, mostly roofed in corrugated metal and fibre cement.

Those roofs are big, they are cheap per square metre, they are frequently unsafe to walk, and almost nobody inspects them. The first sign of a problem is usually water over machinery or bedding.

One flight can cover an entire yard: every shed roof, the gutters between them, the state of the yard surface and the tracks in and out. For a farm business that is a proportionate answer to a question that would otherwise involve somebody on a roof they should not be on.

Where fibre cement is involved the case is stronger still, because the safest inspection is the one where nobody stands on the sheet at all.

Solar arrays are increasingly common on these buildings too, and the fixings and flashings around an array are exactly where water tends to find its way in.

The plateau is open with no shelter to the west, so the town and the parishes around it are persistently wet and windy.

Sustained wind loading on large, lightly built agricultural roofs is a genuine concern, and sheet fixings work loose in a way that a domestic tiled roof does not.

Prolonged wetting also means growth and corrosion progress steadily rather than seasonally, so a roof deteriorates on a curve rather than in an event.

Wind also gets under a sheet roof in a way it cannot get under a tiled one. A single lifted sheet becomes several very quickly, and the difference between catching it and not is usually one winter.

The ground here is heavy clay, and access for plant and scaffold is poor for much of the winter. Gateways cut up, yards turn, and getting anything on wheels near a building becomes a project.

That is a strong practical argument for a survey that needs neither. An aircraft can work from a hard standing or a lane and reach a roof that a vehicle could not get within a hundred metres of.

It also means winter is not a dead season here the way it is for conventional access work, provided the wind cooperates.

The town centre itself is a modest Victorian and Georgian core with terraced and detached cottages, plus post-war estates, generating the ordinary run of domestic findings.

Land work is the other constant: field parcels, drainage, tracks, the Tamar Lakes and the Ruby Country farmland, all of which read far better from above than from a gateway.

Boundary and drainage questions in particular benefit from a dated top-down record, because wet ground looks different in February from how it looks in July and the argument is usually about February.

The town serves a wide rural area, so a visit here is rarely a single job. Two or three farms or holdings on the same trip is the normal shape of a day and works out better for everyone involved.