Drone chimney survey in Crediton

Crediton's long Georgian and Victorian high street runs through the Creedy valley with steep red sandstone hills either side, carrying tall brick stacks on the main frontage, while the surrounding lanes still hold genuine cob and thatch cottages, farmhouses and barn conversions, each with their own, often squatter, stack profile built into or against a cob wall rather than rising as a free-standing brick shaft.

The town is open to Atlantic weather from the west with comparatively little shelter, which drives rain hard against west-facing stack faces along the high street, while the valley itself traps damp air that is particularly hard on thatch ridges and on any north-facing slate or stack surface nearby. That combination, exposed frontage stacks and damp-trapping lanes behind, means two quite different fault patterns can turn up within a few streets of each other.

Beyond the town itself, Crediton sits among some of the most productive farmland in Devon, and a fair number of the properties this site surveys nearby are farmhouses and barn conversions with older stone or stone tile stacks that have had decades of exposure with little maintenance. A close aerial survey covers a rural farmhouse stack as readily as a high street frontage, without needing a scaffold lorry down a farm lane to get there.

Holy Cross Church and Downes House sit within the town itself, but a genuine share of what this site surveys around Crediton is out in the surrounding farmland, in the farmhouses and barn conversions scattered across the Creedy valley's productive land rather than on the high street proper. Those rural stacks are often older and less maintained than anything in the town centre, having gone decades between anyone taking a proper look.

Exeter, Tiverton and Okehampton are all covered on their own pages and all within reasonable range of Crediton, so a survey out in the rural hinterland here can sometimes be scheduled alongside a job in one of those towns to keep travel sensible.

Stone tile, alongside Devon slate, turns up on a number of the older buildings around the town and out into the farmland beyond, and a stone tile roof generally holds its flashing detail differently to a slate one, with a heavier, more textured surface that can hide a lifted lead joint from a distance in a way a flatter slate roof would not.

Farmhouse stacks out in the surrounding parishes are often older than anything on the high street itself, sometimes carrying a single plain pot that has never been replaced since the building was first put up, which is worth bearing in mind when a rural booking turns out to need more careful reading than a younger, better-maintained town stack.

The high street can get busy through the day, and a rural farmhouse booking out in the surrounding parishes is generally the easier launch, with open field access nearby rather than a street to manage.