Drone services in Launceston

Launceston stands on a hill above the Kensey with Bodmin Moor to the south-west and Dartmoor not far east, and it catches weather coming off both. Wind-driven rain from the south-west is the defining condition.

That is precisely why slate hanging is so common on exposed elevations in this town. It is not decoration; it is a wall covering doing a job that render alone would not do here.

When hanging fails it goes at the top edge or at a junction, and the wall behind it starts taking water directly. Photographs of a hung elevation from a few metres out show the pattern of loss clearly enough to price a repair rather than a rebuild.

The height of the town also means chimney stacks stand well clear of anything sheltering them, and stack bedding and flaunching take a corresponding beating.

Rain arriving at an angle is the specific problem. A vertical wall takes very little water in most weather and a great deal of it here, which is what wears out the fixings behind a hung elevation.

The old core inside the walls is tight, with Georgian frontages, slate hung and rendered townhouses, and the castle motte at the summit above it all.

Streets there are narrow and the buildings are close, so scaffolding means a licence and an arrangement with neighbours before anything else happens.

Listed status is common, which makes a record of the existing detail before work a routine requirement rather than an unusual one.

The roofs interlock in the way historic town roofs always do, with valleys, abutments and small flat sections added at different periods.

The gradient inside the walls means one building sits above another, so a failure on an upper roof often shows first in a lower property, and establishing which is which is the awkward part.

Down by the A30 the modern estates and industrial units are a different proposition entirely: conventional tile on the housing and large-span sheet on the units.

Industrial roofs there generate the usual list of corroded sheets, brittle rooflights and valley gutters filling with debris, none of which anybody looks at until water reaches stock.

The estates generate the ordinary domestic findings, and both are straightforward to fly because access and open ground are not a problem on that side of town.

The valley below the town and the farmland around it produce land, barn and boundary work, with the added complication that the county border runs close by and holdings often straddle it.

Travel from Exeter is a significant run down the A30, so jobs here are planned rather than fitted in, and combining two or three in a trip makes better sense for everyone.

The steam railway and the castle bring occasional heritage recording work, usually a structure in its setting rather than a roof condition question.

Boundary questions are common where holdings straddle the county line, and a dated top-down record of what is physically on the ground is a useful thing to have alongside the paperwork.