A drone survey firm covering Chard

Chard is roughly forty five minutes from the Exeter base, out along the eastern corridor past Honiton. It sits at a useful junction of routes, with Axminster, Taunton, Yeovil and Bridport all within reach of each other, which makes it a sensible anchor for a day covering more than one property in this part of Somerset.

As with everywhere on this list, travel is inside the fixed price. What the distance changes is not the cost but the notice: a date here is agreed in advance rather than dropped into a gap, and the more flexibility there is on the date, the better the flying conditions that can be picked.

At over 120 metres on a ridge, this is the most exposed inland town on the list. Wind reaches it from every quarter and it holds snow and frost longer than the surrounding lowland. Both matter to a building and both matter to a flight.

For the building, prolonged freezing and thawing is hard on mortar, on hamstone-bedded ridges and on any covering with an open joint. Water that gets in and then freezes does more damage than water that gets in and drains, which is why an open ridge joint on a Somerset ridge-top is a more urgent finding than the same joint in a sheltered valley.

For the flight, the practical point is that this town can be unflyable when Exeter is calm. The forecast that decides a date here is the local one, and a winter date is set with the understanding that it may move. Nobody is charged for a flight that did not happen.

The long high street carries hamstone and rendered frontages, with hamstone-bedded ridges on the older buildings. Hamstone weathers softly and visibly, which makes it one of the more interesting materials to photograph at high resolution: the difference between weathering and failure is a matter of degree and it is far easier to judge from a close image than from the pavement.

The terraced lace-mill housing and the extensive post-war and modern estates on the lower slopes are more standard work. The streams either side of the main street that run to opposite coasts are a local curiosity rather than a survey consideration, but they are a reminder of how the ground sits: this is a watershed, and water leaves this town in two directions.

Forde Abbey lies a short distance from the town and the surrounding country carries a stock of large historic houses, estate cottages and farm buildings. Instructions from that kind of property are usually for a record across several structures at once, and the reader is often an estate manager or a trustee.

Chard Reservoir and the open ground around it are worth a note for flight planning: open water with wildlife around it is planned around rather than flown over casually, and the exposure on Snowdon Hill above the town is a step up again from the high street.