Drone survey in Cullompton

Cullompton sits on the valley floor, so it holds damp and it holds frost. Both matter to a roof, and frost is the one people underestimate. Water that has soaked into mortar or into a porous tile expands when it freezes, and the damage from that is cumulative rather than sudden.

Where it shows is in bedding mortar at ridges and hips, in pointing at verges, and in the surface of older clay tiles that have started to laminate. All three are edge details at height, and a close photograph of a ridge line after a hard winter tells you far more than a look from the road.

Fore Street has a medieval and Georgian core with cob and thatch in the older lanes, and around it there is a large volume of late twentieth century estate housing plus continuing new build. St Andrew's Church and The Walronds are among the significant historic buildings.

The estate housing is where most enquiries start, and the typical finding is unremarkable but worth knowing: ridge mortar that has begun to fail at thirty years, verge pointing that has cracked, and a flat roof over a garage or a back extension that has reached the end of its life quietly.

Junction 28 and the industrial estates bring profiled metal sheet roofs into the local stock, which is a commercial rather than a domestic job. Large spans, gutters that run a long way, and rooflights that have yellowed and gone brittle.

For those buildings the value of an overhead pass is that it shows the whole drainage picture at once. A gutter blocked at one end of a two hundred metre run is not obvious from inside the unit, and it is obvious from above.

This is one of the more straightforward towns in the area to work in. The ground is level, the estates have gardens and driveways, and the industrial units have yards. There is normally somewhere sensible to take off within a few metres of the building.

The motorway is a feature to plan around rather than a problem, since flights stay well clear of it, and the Culm valley gives useful open ground on either side of the town.

The Walronds and St Andrew's Church anchor a historic core that sits oddly close to a motorway junction, and the older buildings there have the complications that go with age: hand formed valleys, later additions and repairs of several different periods meeting each other.

For an EX15 owner in that part of town, the useful thing a survey does is separate the original fabric from the later work. Most problems on buildings like these are at the joins rather than in the middle of anything, and the joins are all at roof level.

The Culm valley either side of the town gives open ground and easy approaches, so the flying is straightforward even where the buildings are not.