A drone survey firm covering Crediton

Crediton is close enough to Exeter that it behaves like a close-in town rather than a trip: about twenty minutes up the A377 through the Creedy valley. It is also the natural first stop on any run that carries on towards Okehampton or North Devon, which is why a Crediton job is easy to slot into a day that already has something further west in it.

For a farm or estate with several buildings, that proximity is worth knowing about. Photographing four or five structures on one visit is a single job at a single price, and being twenty minutes out means a follow-up on one of them later does not need its own budget.

The building stock around here is not the same as the stock in a coastal town, and neither are the surveys. There is a long Georgian and Victorian high street, but the surrounding lanes carry cob and thatch cottages, and the wider hinterland is farmhouses, barn conversions and working agricultural buildings with corrugated metal roofs spanning far more area than any house.

A large metal-roofed barn is a good drone job for reasons that have nothing to do with height. The spans are wide, the sheets are fixed at intervals nobody can inspect from the ground, and walking a roof like that is not safe in the first place. From the air the whole run of a sheet can be followed at once, and the fixings, the ridge line and the gutter can be read in one pass.

Thatch is different again. A thatched ridge is a wearing part with a known life, and the question an owner usually has is how much of it is left. Photographed from directly above at high resolution, the state of the ridge and the exposure of the fixings are visible in a way they are not from a lane, and nothing has to be leaned against the coat to find out.

The town is open to Atlantic weather from the west with little shelter, and the valley traps damp air, which is hard on thatch ridges and on north-facing Devon slate. Both stay wet longer than the ground above them, and both show it. That is a reason to look at a building here on a shorter cycle than an equivalent one on higher, drier ground, and it is one of the more useful things a report can say about a property in this valley.

Practically, it also means flying weather here is a little better than at Okehampton and considerably better than on the moor, so a date twenty minutes from base in this valley is one of the easier ones on the list to keep.

Alongside the farms and cottages there is a stock of substantial historic buildings around the town, including Holy Cross Church with its red sandstone tower and the Downes estate on the edge of the parish. Buildings of that size and age come with a different kind of instruction: often a trustee, a committee or an estate manager wanting a documented record rather than a homeowner chasing a leak.

For that reader the value is in the imagery being dated, complete and easy to pass on, since the person who reads the report is rarely the person who commissioned it.