Drone roof survey in Saltash

Saltash drops from the town centre to the waterfront under the two bridges in a very short horizontal distance. The old streets running down to Saltash Passage are steep enough that a roof on one side of the road is level with a first floor window on the other, and parking is tight everywhere.

For conventional access that is close to a worst case. A scaffold needs a level base, and building one on a gradient like that means a stepped structure with substantially more material, more labour and more time than the same building on the flat would need.

For a flown survey the gradient is an advantage rather than a problem. Standing above the town gives the aircraft a clean line to roofs that are otherwise very hard to look at, and the whole visit is over in under an hour.

The Tamar valley funnels wind hard, both up from the Sound on a southerly and down the valley on a northerly, and Saltash sits in the middle of it right beside the water. Roofs here take strong, directional, repeated loading rather than occasional gusts.

Salt comes with it. The estuary is tidal and open to the sea, so the air carries salt regularly, and fixings, gutter brackets and flashing clips corrode on the same accelerated timescale as they do on the open coast.

The result is a specific pattern of failure: slates slipping one at a time as individual nails fail, ridge tiles working loose where the bedding has been softened by repeated wetting, and lead flashings pulling away at the upstand.

The old waterfront quarter is small terraced cottages, many with slate hung elevations facing the water because that is what has always been needed there. Slate hanging is a weatherproofing layer and it fails invisibly, because from the ground you are looking at it edge on and cannot see whether the slates behind the top course are still where they should be.

Above that, the Victorian villas and then the large post-war estates at Burraton and Latchbrook run to concrete interlocking tile on standard pitches. The estate stock is now at the age where mortar bedded ridges start letting go, and on this site the wind finds them quickly.

Extensions and garages with flat felt roofs are common across the estates, and the junction where a flat roof meets a tiled main slope is a recurring find.

The two bridges that define Saltash, the Royal Albert and the Tamar road bridge, sit almost overhead of the older waterfront streets, and properties in their shadow get a specific kind of turbulent wind as gusts deflect off the structures themselves. It is a small, local effect that a general Tamar valley forecast will not predict, and it is one more reason a survey flown on the day beats a generic assumption about which way the wind normally blows here.