Drone inspection services in Liskeard

The industrial ground here sits below the town at Moorswater, in the valley, and it carries a thoroughly mixed stock: working industrial units, older stone and metal ranges tied to the mineral railway history, and modern sheds alongside them. The mix means a portfolio in this town can contain buildings a hundred and forty years apart.

The older ranges are the interesting inspection. Delabole and natural slate on substantial spans, stone gable and ridge detailing, and metal roofing added over decades on adjacent structures. These are buildings that reward being photographed properly, because the failures are localised and the repairs are specific.

The modern units are the standard pass, and the reason to do both in the same visit is that a valley site like this rarely has one owner responsible for one building type.

The town sits high between Bodmin Moor and the south coast, rainfall is well above average, and driving rain from the south-west is constant through the winter. That is a lot of water arriving horizontally at buildings, month after month.

Horizontal water is a different test to vertical water. It gets under laps, into verges, behind flashings, and through the gaps around anything penetrating a wall or a roof. Details that would shed rain falling downward can fail completely when the same water arrives sideways, which is why slate hanging is so widespread on the older stock here.

It also means the south-west face of every building is the one to inspect first and the one that will be a generation ahead in wear. On a symmetrical building the difference between its two long elevations is often obvious in a single set of photographs.

Copper and tin wealth built a substantial centre of stone and rendered commercial buildings, most of which now carry retail, office or hospitality use. Their roofs are tall, slated, complicated behind the frontage, and largely unvisited.

The pattern is familiar from every town of this type: a good front, a complicated back, valley gutters between properties, and rear extensions of every era. Recording the whole roofscape of a terrace at once is far more useful than recording one building, because the drainage arrangements do not respect the boundaries.

The town's public hall, its civic buildings and the surviving stone commercial premises around them represent a particular category of risk, because they are large, they are old, and their roofs are usually the responsibility of an organisation without a property department. A trustee board or a small management committee holding a building of that size has no realistic way of knowing what condition its roof is in, and an aerial record is often the first proper look anybody has had at it. That report tends to change how the building is budgeted for.