Drone services in Ottery St Mary

Ottery sits on gently rolling ground in the Otter valley, inland enough to be sheltered from the sea and low enough to hold mist. Damp settles here and lingers, so moss and lichen establish quickly on shaded slopes and in valleys, and stay established.

For flying, the same mist is the practical constraint. A morning flight in the valley bottom often waits an hour for visibility to lift rather than being lost, which is worth knowing when a slot is being agreed.

Autumn is the season that decides most of it. Leaf fall in a damp valley fills gutters and hidden valleys quickly, and a blocked valley on an older roof backs water up under the covering rather than spilling it over the edge where somebody would notice.

St Mary's dominates the town and sets the tone for the historic core around it: Georgian and Victorian frontages, complicated roofs, lead detailing and parapets on the larger buildings. Nothing about that stock is straightforward to inspect and much of it is listed.

Owners of buildings in that category tend to want a record before work rather than after a failure, partly for a conservation officer and partly because a repair to a historic roof is priced very differently once somebody can actually see what is up there.

Out from the centre the lanes carry cob and thatch survivals, and both are unforgiving of water. A thatched ridge cannot be inspected from a ladder, and a cob wall does not want a failed gutter running down it for a winter.

Those two facts together account for most of the domestic survey enquiries from the surrounding parishes, and they are the reason a photographic approach took hold here faster than in towns with simpler stock.

Barn conversions in the surrounding parishes add a third category. They combine old fabric with newer rooflights, flat-roofed link sections and glazing, and the junctions between the old and the new parts are where nearly all of the problems are.

North and west of the centre the post-war and modern estates are conventional concrete tile, generating the ordinary run of ridge, verge and gutter findings that a single pass answers.

There is a modest but steady stream of picture work too. The Tumbling Weir, Cadhay and the farmland along the Otter photograph well from height, and rural property here sells on setting as much as on the building, so an aerial view of the plot earns its place in a listing.

The other steady stream is land. Paddocks, smallholdings and small parcels change hands regularly around here, and a top-down record of a parcel with its access, boundaries and drainage saves a great deal of argument later.