Drone surveys in Bideford, flown by the surveyor who writes them

Bideford is about an hour and a quarter from Exeter, at the western end of the North Devon run. Like Barnstaple it is planned as a day rather than a call, and it pairs naturally with other work in the area.

Travel is inside the fixed price regardless. What distance changes is notice: a couple of weeks of flexibility on the date makes it far easier to put a good weather window and a North Devon trip together.

The old town rises very steeply from the quay on the east bank, with tightly packed cottages up the hill and Georgian merchant houses on Bridgeland Street. Scaffold access here is difficult in the ordinary sense of the word: narrow streets, no room to stand a tower, level changes on every plot, and buildings that share walls and gutters.

That is the practical reason aerial survey earns its place in this town rather than merely being convenient. On several of these streets the alternative to a flight is not a cheaper inspection, it is no inspection at all until something fails.

Slate hanging is common on the exposed elevations here, and it is common precisely because of the driving rain. A hung elevation is a rain screen: it exists to keep water off a wall that would otherwise soak through in an Atlantic gale.

From above and from an angle, a hung elevation reads very clearly. Missing and slipped slates show as dark gaps, patched areas show as a change in colour and coursing, and the head detail where the hanging meets the roof is visible in a way it never is from the pavement below. Since the whole point of the hanging is to stop water reaching the wall, a gap in it is not cosmetic.

Alongside that there is natural slate on the roofs, clay pantile in places, and concrete tile on the later housing spreading east and towards Northam. Three different lifespans on one street is normal.

The Torridge estuary opens west and the weather arrives from the Atlantic with salt on it. That is the same pattern as Barnstaple: not one dramatic storm but repeated, prolonged wetting with salt in it, which corrodes fixings and keeps shaded slopes damp.

Appledore towards the estuary mouth and Northam on the higher ground are more exposed again, and Northam Burrows beyond them is open ground taking the full weather. Where a job is out that way, the wind check matters more than the rain check.

The Long Bridge and the quay define the town centre, and both mean public ground close to buildings that need surveying. Early starts do most of the work in resolving that.