Drone services in Ilfracombe

Ilfracombe takes Atlantic gales and salt on the north coast with the town wedged between steep hills and high cliffs. There is no sheltered version of this town.

The Victorian resort terraces and hotels climb the hillsides in dramatic rows, many rendered and painted, and they carry parapets, hidden gutters and complicated roof geometry.

That construction is the specific local risk. A parapet gutter that fails does not spill outside; it fills and comes through a ceiling, so the first sign is internal and by then the water has been getting in for a while.

Painted render adds a second layer of concealment, because a surface can look fine while the render behind it has blown.

Salt reaches everything here, including elevations that face away from the sea, because wind wraps around a hillside town rather than passing over it in a straight line.

A great deal of the stock is hotels and hotel conversions, which means large roofs with flat and mansard sections and, very often, many owners with an interest in one covering.

A shared set of photographs is usually the fastest way to get a freeholder, a management company and several leaseholders looking at the same problem rather than three descriptions of it.

Hotel roofs also carry plant, extraction and service penetrations, each one a potential entry point that nobody has inspected.

Between seasons is the practical time to check, which means autumn and early spring rather than the middle of the summer.

Absentee and seasonal ownership is common, so a building may go months without anybody looking at the outside of it, and that is the pattern that turns a small failure into a large one.

Getting equipment to a roof on these slopes is expensive and slow, and on the tallest terraces it is a serious undertaking rather than a day's work.

That is the ordinary reason photographic survey work makes sense here: not because it is clever, but because the alternative is out of proportion to the question.

Buildings above and below one another also share drainage paths, so a failure in one place shows up in another, and a view from above is the only sensible way to trace it.

Launch points are scarce on a hillside this steep, and the obvious spots are usually somebody's garden or a public path, so where a flight starts from is arranged in advance rather than found on arrival.

The harbour, Hillsborough, Capstone and the Tunnels Beaches are the town's assets, and hospitality here trades on the setting more than on the building.

Cliff work needs planning around the drop, the footpath traffic and the protected status of parts of the coast, so those flights are prepared rather than improvised.

Post-war housing on the higher slopes rounds out the domestic work, conventional roofs in an exposed position generating the ordinary findings at an accelerated pace.

Property here sells on the position above the harbour and the coast, and that relationship between building and setting is precisely what a ground level photograph cannot show.