Drone survey in Ilfracombe

The Victorian resort terraces and hotels here climb the hillside in dramatic rows, many rendered and painted, and a great number of them carry parapets with gutters behind them. That construction is the local survey issue, because a parapet gutter fails inward.

The sequence is always the same. The gutter silts up or a lead joint opens, water backs up behind the parapet and goes into the building, and the first anybody knows is a stain on a top floor ceiling. Nothing is visible from the street because the parapet is doing what it was designed to do, which is hide the roof.

Atlantic gales and salt hit this coast without obstruction, and the town is wedged between steep hills and high cliffs with Hillsborough rising immediately east. That is a hard combination for a building and a hard one for access.

The hotel conversions add flat and mansard roofs to the mix, which brings their own detailing demands into a place where wind-driven rain is a normal condition rather than an occasional one.

Ground is steep and space is tight, so take off positions are worked out beforehand and are often well above or below the property. Capstone Hill and the harbour give open approaches on the seaward side.

Wind is the practical limit. On the north coast a flyable window can be short, and jobs here are booked with that understood rather than promised for a fixed morning.

Much of the large Victorian stock is now flats or holiday accommodation, so a roof belongs to a company or a group of leaseholders. The report has to serve as evidence for people who cannot get onto the roof and who need to agree on spending.

For a hotel the timing question is seasonal: finding a problem in November is a repair, finding it in July is a repair plus lost rooms.

Almost everything in Ilfracombe is on a gradient, and the buildings around the harbour and Tunnels Beaches are stacked so that one property's roof is another's view. That has a practical consequence: photographing a roof here almost always involves being able to see somebody else's.

Flights are planned to keep the camera on the subject building, which is a matter of position and angle rather than of restriction. On a hillside town it takes more thought than on a flat one, and it is worth agreeing in advance which elevations matter most.

For EX34 properties on the upper slopes the compensation is that approaches from above are clean and the standoff distances are comfortable, which usually produces better images than a cramped position at ground level ever could.