A drone survey firm covering Ilfracombe

Ilfracombe is the furthest town this site publishes, about an hour and a quarter from the Exeter base. Coverage claims stop being useful at some point and this is where this one ends: beyond here, a firm nearer to you is probably the better answer, and that is a more useful thing for a buyer to read than another twenty town names.

Within that, the job is run the same way as any other. A booked date, a fixed price with travel inside it, the same surveyor, and a written report inside 48 hours. The practical advice is to book it alongside Barnstaple or Bideford if there is anything else to look at, because the drive is the only expensive part.

The town is wedged between steep hills and high cliffs, with the ground falling sharply to a small sheltered harbour. The Victorian resort terraces and hotels climb the hillsides in dramatic rows, many of them rendered and painted, with flat and mansard roofs on the hotel conversions and slate hanging on the exposed faces.

Those tall terraces have parapets and hidden gutters, and that is the defining local survey problem. Water that gets past a parapet gutter does not run down the outside of the building where somebody would see it. It goes into the structure, and the first evidence is usually a stain on a ceiling two floors down, by which time the timber it passed through has been wet for a season or more.

There is no practical way to inspect a hidden gutter on a four storey Victorian terrace from the ground. Flown, it takes minutes, and the state of the lead, the outlets and the debris in it is plain in a photograph.

This is unfiltered Atlantic exposure with salt on the wind, on very steep ground, on tall buildings. Every one of those makes a roof detail work harder, and together they make this one of the more demanding places in the county for a building envelope.

It also makes flying here conditional. Wind off the north coast is the usual reason a date moves, and with an hour and a quarter of driving involved, a marginal forecast means moving it rather than travelling hopefully. Nobody is charged for a flight that did not happen, and a rearranged North Devon visit is normal.

Hotel conversions and communal blocks make up a good share of the work here, which means a large proportion of these reports are read by somebody other than the person who commissioned them: a management company, a group of leaseholders, an insurer. That is why the report is written to be forwarded rather than explained.

The harbour itself and Capstone Hill immediately above it are the two features that constrain almost every flight in the town. The hill blocks sightlines from one direction and channels wind from another, and the harbour front carries visitors for most of the year.

Tunnels Beaches and the cliff paths on either side are the same story. None of it prevents a survey, but all of it means the launch position and the time of day are decided in advance rather than found on arrival.