Drone roof survey in Barnstaple

Barnstaple sits at the tidal limit of the Taw, and the estuary gives Atlantic weather a clear run in from the west. North Devon rainfall is high and the wetting is prolonged rather than intense, which is a specific problem for roofs because it never gives them time to dry.

Prolonged wetting is the driver behind most of what a survey finds here. Moss and lichen establish heavily and fast, particularly on north-facing slopes and in valleys. Mortar bedding softens and then breaks up over successive freeze and thaw cycles. Nails and clips corrode.

The salt content on the wind is lower than it is at Ilfracombe or Bude, but on a strong westerly it is present, and the estuary is tidal so the air is rarely dry.

The Georgian and Victorian centre around the Pannier Market and Butchers Row has complex older roofs with parapets, lead work and multiple planes over buildings that have been altered repeatedly.

The Victorian terraces climbing the slopes at Newport and Sticklepath behave like terraced stock anywhere: slate, shared valleys, brick stacks, and problems that travel between properties.

Roundswell and the trading estates bring large span commercial roofs, where the findings are corroded sheet fixings, blocked long run valley gutters, and rooflights that have gone brittle and can no longer be walked on safely. Those buildings are exactly the case for surveying from the air, because the covering itself is a fall risk.

Barnstaple is the practical centre for North Devon work, and surveys here are often booked alongside others at Bideford, Braunton or Ilfracombe on the same day. Grouping addresses geographically is what makes portfolio work affordable, because travel gets shared rather than charged twice.

The surrounding countryside is livestock farming, which means farmhouses, barns and long runs of corrugated sheet on outbuildings, generally at the end of tracks that are soft through the winter.

For a farm the outbuilding roofs are usually the priority, because a sheet that lifts in a gale is an immediate hazard rather than a slow leak.

The Tarka Trail follows the estuary out past the town in both directions, a sign of how much of North Devon's settlement pattern sits along the water rather than away from it, and estuary-side properties from Fremington to Instow share Barnstaple's problem of prolonged wetting more than they share anything with a farm a few miles inland. Rock Park and the streets around the Long Bridge are the lowest lying part of the town centre, and roofs there see the same damp air rising off the water as the estuary villages further out, whatever the address on the survey happens to say. The trading estates and the town centre are close enough together that a single day's booking commonly covers a Pannier Market roof in the morning and a Roundswell industrial unit in the afternoon, which keeps the cost of covering North Devon's spread out settlements down for anyone commissioning more than one survey.