Drone survey in Brixham

The harbour slopes carry tightly packed fishermen's cottages, a lot of them rendered and painted, with Victorian terraces above and post-war housing on the upper ground. Render is the local answer to weather, and it works, but it hides what is behind it and it fails in ways that are easy to miss until a whole panel comes off.

From the air you can see the pattern of it: hairline cracking following a lintel, a blown patch under a cill where water has been getting in, staining below a gutter joint that has been dripping for years. On a painted elevation those are far more visible from above and to the side than they are from directly underneath on the street.

Brixham is the most exposed part of Torbay. Easterly gales come straight into the harbour, and the Berry Head headland takes wind from every quarter, so the fixings on ridges, hips and verges are worked harder here than anywhere else in the bay.

That has a practical consequence for surveys. After a run of winter storms the things worth photographing are the edges: a ridge tile that has rocked loose, a hip that has lost its bedding, a verge where the pointing has gone and the end tile is now only held by its neighbours. None of that is visible from a street below a steep roof.

The town is built in a steep bowl and the streets around the harbour are narrow, so take off ground is the first thing to sort out. Frequently the answer is higher up the hill rather than at the property, which works fine because an aircraft can descend to a roof from above.

Harbour traffic and the working port also matter. Flights are planned to keep clear of the fish market and the quays when they are busy, which usually means early rather than mid morning, and that is a scheduling detail rather than an obstacle.

Storm damage claims are a bigger part of the picture here than in sheltered towns, and insurers want to know what a roof looked like before as well as after. A dated set of images from a calm week is the thing most people wish they had when they are trying to show that a slate was sound in October.

There is a second local use. A lot of Brixham property changes hands as holiday accommodation or is let out, and buyers ask harder questions about exposure than they do inland. Photographs answer those faster than a paragraph in a listing.

Berry Head is a national nature reserve on the headland east of the town and Churston sits on the higher ground to the west, so the flying here is bounded by a protected landscape on one side and open country on the other.

For a TQ5 property the useful local distinction is height above the harbour. The cottages in the bowl are sheltered by the sides of it, and anything on the upper ground takes the full weight of whatever is blowing across the headland.

Churston and the modern development that way are ordinary suburban survey subjects with gardens and space, which is a marked contrast to the harbour slopes a mile downhill.