Drone chimney survey in Dawlish

Dawlish's Regency and Victorian terraces around The Lawn carry conventional rendered parapet and brick stacks typical of the period, seafront hotels and apartment blocks nearer the water lean towards flat roofs and rendered parapets, and extensive post-war bungalow development on the cliff tops carries much plainer, single-storey chimneys that nonetheless take the very worst of the town's coastal exposure, given how little shelter a bungalow roofline offers compared with a taller terrace behind it.

The town sits in a narrow valley cut into red sandstone cliffs, with the main railway line running along the sea wall at the foot of the town, and this is among the most storm-exposed places on the whole South Devon coast that this site covers. South-easterly gales throw sea water clean over the wall, and the cliff-top bungalow estates take unbroken wind with nothing ahead of them to slow it down, so ridge, verge and flashing failures on those exposed roofs are common after almost any serious storm season.

Given how exposed the cliff-top estates and the seafront terraces both are, a close photographic record of a Dawlish stack's condition, taken after a storm season or simply as a matter of course, is worth having as dated evidence in its own right, not only when something has visibly gone wrong. A flown survey covers that ground without a ladder on cliff-edge ground that is often unstable to work near in any case.

Dawlish Warren, the sand spit at the mouth of the valley, and the red sandstone cliffs that give the town its distinctive colour both sit close to the main built-up area, and the cliff-top bungalow estates mentioned already run right along the top of those same cliffs with essentially nothing between them and the open sea. The Lawn and Dawlish Water mark the calmer, more sheltered heart of the original Regency town, a markedly different environment to the cliff top only a short walk away.

Teignmouth, Exeter, Newton Abbot and Exmouth are all within reasonable range of Dawlish and all covered on their own pages, worth knowing if a booking here can be combined with a nearby job.

Flat felt roofs on the post-war bungalows and their extensions handle a stack differently again to the Regency terraces around The Lawn, generally with a simpler upstand rather than a traditional flashing, though the storm exposure already described works just as hard on that felt junction as it does on anything more traditional nearby.

The Regency terraces around The Lawn typically carry a matching run of pots consistent with the planned development of that part of town, while the later cliff-top bungalow stacks are plainer and shorter, built to a much simpler post-war standard than anything from the original resort era.

The Lawn and the town centre are easiest to launch from, while the cliff-top bungalow estates further out generally need a different launch point altogether given how exposed that open ground is to whatever the wind is doing that day.