Drone roof inspection in Ottery St Mary

The lanes around Ottery St Mary's historic centre are narrow, twist round the church and were never built with a scaffold wagon in mind. Many of the older cottages sit directly on the lane with no front garden at all, which leaves no room to build a scaffold base without putting it in the road itself. On a lane that is also the only route through for local traffic, that is rarely something the highways department will agree to for long.

A drone does not need a base in the road, it needs a small patch of clear ground nearby, a driveway, a farm gate, a corner of a field. It reaches the roof from there in under a minute and photographs every pitch, valley and chimney without a single vehicle needing to park up on the lane at all. For a cottage in one of the older streets around the church, that is often the difference between a job that can happen this week and one that needs a road closure arranged weeks in advance.

A number of properties in and around Ottery, particularly in the lanes leading out towards the Otter valley, are thatched, and thatch is not a roof you want a ladder or a scaffold pole resting against under any circumstances. Thatchers and insurers alike treat physical contact with a thatched roof as a fire and damage risk, which usually means any inspection has to be arranged around the thatcher's own schedule and their own equipment, adding weeks to something that should be routine.

Flying past a thatched roof involves no contact at all, so none of those restrictions apply. The drone photographs the ridge, the wrapping around chimneys and the eaves from a safe distance, which is exactly the detail an insurer or a buyer's surveyor usually wants to see without needing to coordinate with a specialist thatching contractor just to get someone close enough to look.

Ottery sits low in the Otter valley, and the historic centre around St Mary's is tightly packed, with shared courtyards and yards behind the Georgian and Victorian frontages that were never designed for a modern scaffold delivery. Parking in the town centre is limited at the best of times, and a scaffold lorry blocking the market square, even briefly, is the kind of disruption that draws attention fast in a town this size.

The construction industry background behind this business means the point of access is never guesswork, it is assessed properly before a flight is planned, same as any other job. For the tightly packed centre, that usually means launching from the nearest open ground, a farm track, a car park corner, and flying in rather than trying to find room for equipment in a street that was never going to have any to spare.