Drone services in Liskeard

The Victorian centre was built on mining wealth and it shows: substantial stone and rendered buildings with generous roofs, Delabole and natural slate, and detailing that assumed money would be available to maintain it.

Delabole slate is excellent material and it long outlives its fixings, so the usual finding on a roof of this age is not a failed slate but a failed nail. Slates slip individually, in no obvious pattern, and each one leaves a hole.

That pattern is hard to read from the ground because a single slipped slate three courses up is almost invisible from the pavement and completely obvious from above.

Terraced miners' cottages around the town carry the same coverings on a smaller scale, with shared valleys and tightly packed access.

Rendered elevations on the larger Victorian buildings hide the state of the stone behind them, so a blown patch of render is usually a symptom of something that started a good deal earlier.

The town sits high between Bodmin Moor and the south coast, and rainfall is well above average with driving rain from the south-west more or less constant through the winter.

That is why slate hanging is common on exposed elevations here, and why the elevations that face the weather need looking at more often than the sheltered ones.

Prolonged wetting rather than storm damage is the main agent of decay, so surveys tend to find gradual problems: growth holding water, softened bedding, a valley that has been damp since October.

Frost matters at this height as well. Damp mortar that freezes and thaws through a winter loses its face, and a ridge that was merely tired in autumn can be properly loose by spring.

The eastern side of the town falls into steep valleys, which puts some properties well above or below their neighbours and complicates access accordingly.

Where a property sits on a slope, the flight has to work around the gradient, because the ground above hides one elevation and the ground below exaggerates another.

It is a small technical point that makes a large difference to whether a set of photographs actually answers the question that was asked.

Access on the older streets is tight enough that a scaffold usually needs an arrangement with a neighbour, which is the ordinary practical reason photographs get chosen instead.

Beyond the town, the approach to Bodmin Moor and the Looe valley bring farmland, tracks and boundary work, along with agricultural buildings whose roofs nobody inspects.

Land parcels change hands regularly around here and a top-down record with access, boundaries and drainage visible is worth considerably more than a written description.

Travel from Exeter is a long run, so work in this direction is planned and usually paired with something else rather than treated as a call-out.

Barn conversions in the surrounding parishes bring the recurring junction problem: old fabric meeting new rooflights and link sections, with nearly all the water finding its way in where the two meet.