Drone services in Tavistock

The planned Victorian centre in green Hurdwick stone is what makes Tavistock look the way it does, and it comes with tall, heavy chimney stacks on steep sites. Wind loading on a stack in that position is a live concern rather than a theoretical one, and lean, cracked flaunching and perished pointing are among the more common findings here.

Stone-bedded ridges and Delabole slate add to the picture. Both are durable and both are heavy, so when a detail does fail it tends to fail properly rather than gradually, and catching movement early is worth a good deal.

Rendered and painted elevations on the later stock add another dimension, because a stack that is rendered hides the state of its brickwork completely until the render itself starts to blow.

With the moor to the east and the prevailing south-westerly running up the Tamar valley, this is a persistently wet town. Prolonged wetting rather than a single storm is what does the damage, and slate that never dries holds growth that lifts tails and works at fixings.

Steep sites make it worse in a specific way: a roof above the general roofline of its street catches more wind and more rain than the sheltered valley position of the town would suggest.

The Tamar valley below the town holds mist as well, so early flights on that side often wait for visibility rather than for wind, which is a different sort of delay and usually a shorter one.

The surrounding villages carry terraced miners' cottages, small, tightly packed and sharing valleys and party walls. Access is poor, gardens are small and a scaffold usually means an arrangement with a neighbour, all of which pushes work towards photographing rather than climbing.

The mining heritage landscape itself is a World Heritage Site, which brings a separate stream of enquiries about recording structures, ground and access on land where nobody wants anything disturbed.

Barn conversions in the villages are a recurring subject: old fabric with modern rooflights and link sections, and problems concentrated almost entirely at the junctions between the two.

Dartmoor's restricted ground sits immediately east, so sites on that side of the town need checking properly rather than assuming. Wind off the moor also arrives in gusts rather than a steady flow, which is a flying consideration as much as a maintenance one.

Travel from the Exeter base is the best part of an hour, so work here is usually planned rather than squeezed in, and pairing two or three jobs in the same trip makes better sense for everybody than three separate visits.

Pairing jobs also makes the photography side easier. Anyone here who wants images of a property for a sale usually wants them in specific light, and that is far more achievable on a planned trip than on a call-out.