Drone services in Honiton

Honiton's Georgian high street is one of the most consistent in the county, rebuilt after the eighteenth century fires, and from the pavement it reads as a single simple thing. From above it does not. Behind those frontages sit long rear ranges, valleys, catslides, later Victorian additions and roof junctions that were bolted on over two centuries.

That gap between what the street shows and what the roof actually is accounts for a good share of local enquiries. Somebody has a leak in a back room, the front of the building looks immaculate, and there is no way to work out what is happening at the back without getting above it.

The high street is also commercial at ground level and residential above, which means the person with the leak and the person who owns the roof are frequently not the same person. A shared set of photographs is often the quickest way to get those two into the same conversation.

The town lies along the Otter valley on the old coaching road, and it is prone to fog that sits for days through the winter. Roofs stay damp for long stretches, which is exactly the condition organic growth wants.

The same fog decides flying days. Between November and February the useful windows here are fewer and shorter than the raw weather forecast suggests, and a slot that looks fine in Exeter can be unworkable in the valley bottom.

The Blackdown Hills rise steeply north and east, and weather coming over them behaves differently from weather off the sea. Gusts accelerate over the escarpment and drop into the valley, which loads ridges and chimney stacks harder than the sheltered inland position implies.

On the older buildings that shows up as movement in stack bedding and lifted ridge tiles rather than the salt corrosion you get on the coast. It is a different failure pattern entirely, and worth knowing before anybody assumes an inland town is an easy one.

Chimney stacks take the worst of it. A tall stack on an exposed frontage catches gusts from two directions in the same storm, and the failure is usually in the bedding or the flaunching rather than anything dramatic, which makes it easy to miss and cheap to fix.

Substantial post-war and modern estates north and west of the centre bring the usual concrete tile findings, and the surrounding farmland brings barns, tracks and land parcels.

Dumpdon Hill and the Blackdown Hills area also generate a slow trickle of landscape and land management enquiries, where the useful output is a record of ground cover, access and boundaries rather than anything to do with a building at all.

Antique and independent retail along the street brings a small amount of picture work as well, usually a business wanting an image of its own premises in the context of the town rather than a shopfront photograph taken from the kerb.