A drone survey firm covering Tiverton

Tiverton is about twenty five minutes from base, up the motorway and along the link road. It sits on the same corridor as Cullompton and, a little further on, Wellington and Taunton, which is the practical reason a landlord or agent with buildings in more than one of those places should book them together rather than separately.

Nothing about the drive here is weather-dependent in the way the moor roads are, so a date in Tiverton is one of the more reliable ones to hold. What moves a date here is wind on the day rather than anything about getting to the town.

The town is built where the Lowman joins the Exe, with the centre low and the residential streets climbing sharply north and west. That does two things to a survey. It means a good number of properties sit above the general roofline of their neighbours, where wind loading is measurably higher and ridge and verge details work harder. It also means that from ground level you often cannot see the roof of a building at all, because it is either far above you or far below you.

The stock is varied: a medieval and Georgian centre, Victorian mill workers' terraces with shared stacks and hidden valleys, extensive post-war estates, and large modern development on the eastern edge. Older outlying buildings carry stone slate, which is heavy, brittle and a poor candidate for anyone walking on it, and which is exactly the kind of covering a high resolution camera reads better than a person standing on a ladder.

The Exe valley here is notably wet, well above the Devon average. For a building that means prolonged wetting is the main agent of decay on shaded slopes rather than any single dramatic event, and a condition record every few years tells you more than a one-off inspection ever will.

For scheduling it means the useful flying window is narrower than in drier parts of the county, particularly through the winter. A visit here is set against a forecast, and if the forecast turns the date moves. Rescheduling costs nothing and nobody is charged for a flight that did not happen, which is the only sensible way to run survey work in a valley that wet.

Knightshayes, Blundell's and the canal give the town a stock of large institutional and estate buildings as well, and those are jobs where a written record with dated imagery is worth considerably more than an opinion, because the reader is usually a trustee, a bursar or a committee rather than the person who commissioned it.

The Grand Western Canal runs along the eastern edge of the town, and the flat ground beside it is some of the easiest launching ground in an otherwise steep place. That is a small thing that makes a real difference on a hill town: a clear, level position with long sightlines is worth walking a few minutes for.

The lower town around the confluence is where the older commercial stock sits, with flat roofs and rear additions behind Georgian frontages, and those rear areas are almost never seen by anybody at ground level.