Drone roof inspection in Totnes

Totnes's medieval and Elizabethan high street is famous for its jettied buildings, upper floors that overhang the street below, and while that makes for a striking townscape it also makes ladder access a real problem. A ladder needs to rest against something solid and reach the roof on a reasonably direct line, and a jettied frontage puts the roof edge further out than the ground floor wall, so the ladder foot and the roof edge are rarely anywhere near each other.

Flying removes that mismatch completely. The drone does not need a wall to rest against, it holds position in open air exactly where the roof edge actually is, jetty or no jetty, and photographs the eaves, the fascia and the valley behind from a stable hover. For a high street building where the upper floor has crept out over the pavement for four hundred years, that is often the only way to get a properly close look without scaffold engineered specially for the overhang.

The main street runs hard uphill from the river to the castle, and several of the buildings on the steepest stretch sit on plots that step down sharply from front to back. A scaffold tower needs a level base, and on a slope like this that usually means significant extra staging, sometimes built out from the pavement itself, before the tower is even square enough to climb. Getting a scaffold licence for that stretch of road, one of the busiest in the town, is its own process on top.

A drone launches from wherever there is a clear patch nearby, often lower down the hill or from a side street off the main run, and climbs to the roof without needing the ground beneath it to be flat at all. That matters particularly on the steepest section, where the difference in level between the front and back of a building can be a full storey, something no standard scaffold package is designed around.

The historic core is tightly packed, slate hung frontages standing shoulder to shoulder, and that means a lot of hidden valleys and party wall abutments where two roofs meet and debris collects out of sight from the ground. Checking one of these properly usually means getting onto the roof itself, which for a party wall valley can mean access across a neighbour's property as much as your own, a conversation that can hold a job up on its own.

A drone photographs both sides of a party wall valley from above without setting foot on either roof, which sidesteps the neighbour access question entirely. It also reaches the outskirts at Bridgetown and Follaton just as easily, where the modern estates have straightforward driveway access but still save a homeowner the cost and disruption of a scaffold tower for what is usually a routine check.