Drone inspection services in Tavistock

The planned Victorian centre here was built on mining wealth and it is built properly: green Hurdwick stone, generous scale, tall stacks and slate roofs with stone-bedded ridges. Many of those buildings now carry commercial or mixed use, and their roofs are a different maintenance proposition to anything on a modern estate.

Stone-bedded ridges and slate on a building of that height fail slowly and expensively. A ridge that has lost its bedding lets water into the top course, the slate below loosens, and the process runs for years before anything shows internally. The stacks are the other concern: tall, exposed, and carrying flaunching and flashing details a long way above any safe standing position.

None of that is reachable without a scaffold or a substantial platform, and on a listed or historically sensitive building the access itself needs care. A camera reaches it without touching the building at all, which is often the only way an owner gets a look at their own ridge line.

Dartmoor sits to the east and the prevailing south-westerly brings rain up the Tamar, so this is a very wet town. Steep sites are the multiplier: a building part way up a slope sits in higher wind loading than the roofline around it suggests, and tall stone chimneys on those sites carry real wind load.

For the trade and industrial stock at Crelake and Pixon Lane the pattern is the familiar one, with the wetness dialled up. Gutter silt stays saturated, corrosion runs at joints, and organic growth colonises anything shaded within a season or two.

The interval that makes sense here is closer to the Okehampton end of the range than the Yeovil end. Annual on anything exposed, and autumn rather than midwinter so the photographs are usable.

The town sits within the Cornwall and West Devon Mining World Heritage Site, and a proportion of the commercial building stock is historically designated in one form or another. That raises the cost of any physical intervention, including access equipment, and raises the value of a record that requires none.

Where a building is listed, an aerial photographic record is often the most detailed survey of its roof anybody has, and it is the thing a conservation-accredited surveyor or a specialist roofer will want to see before quoting.

The wider parish also carries a scatter of former mine buildings, engine houses and agricultural ranges in various states of repair, many of them now in commercial or holiday use. Buildings of that kind rarely have a maintenance history and often have no drawings at all, so the first useful document anybody produces for them is a set of photographs of what is actually there. For an owner planning works or a lender assessing security, that record does more work than a written description ever will.