Drone services in South Molton

South Molton serves a wide area of livestock farmland, and the surrounding parishes are full of farmhouses, barns and working agricultural buildings with corrugated metal roofs.

Those buildings carry the bulk of the roof area in this parish and almost none of the inspection. They are large, cheap per square metre, frequently unsafe to walk, and looked at only when something has already gone wrong.

One flight covers a whole yard: every shed, the gutters between them, the yard surface and the tracks. It is a proportionate answer to a question that otherwise involves somebody climbing something they should not.

Exposed farm buildings on open ground also take sustained wind loading, and sheet fixings work loose in a way that a domestic tiled roof does not.

Solar arrays on farm buildings are increasingly common here as well, and the fixings and flashings around an array are exactly where water tends to find its way in on an otherwise sound sheet roof.

Exmoor to the north makes this a wet part of Devon, with high rainfall and long wetting periods rather than short intense storms.

That produces steady rather than sudden decay: growth on shaded slate, softened mortar, corrosion progressing on a curve.

It also means workable flying windows in winter are fewer than the raw forecast suggests, so slots stay flexible and get moved when the weather turns.

Snow and hail come into it at this altitude too, and both find the weaknesses that ordinary rain would leave alone for another season.

The centre around the square and the Guildhall is a handsome Georgian group with slate and clay plain tile, tightly arranged and largely listed.

Access there is the usual market town problem: narrow streets, close buildings, and a scaffold that means a licence and an arrangement with neighbours.

Terraced cottages behind the square share valleys and abutments in the way terraces of that age always do, and the junctions are where the water gets in.

Modern estates to the east are conventional and quick, producing the ordinary short list of findings.

Land work is constant here: field parcels, drainage, tracks, hedge banks and access, all of which read from above in one frame and take a long morning to walk.

The Exmoor approach brings open ground records as well, where the subject is ground cover, boundaries and access rather than any building.

Holdings change hands regularly and a dated top-down record is worth considerably more to a buyer or an agent than a written description of the same ground.

It is a long run from Exeter, so a visit here is normally two or three jobs rather than one, which suits the way farms tend to have several questions at once.

Barn conversions are frequent in the surrounding parishes, and as everywhere the problems concentrate at the junctions where old fabric meets new rooflights, link sections and glazing.