Drone chimney survey in Great Torrington

Great Torrington's Georgian and Victorian centre sits around the square, with terraced cottages carrying conventional brick stacks and a legacy of glassworks and creamery industry nearby, and post-war estates on the plateau above the town carry plainer, more recent chimneys. The defining fact about the town's position, more than any single building style, is the ground it stands on.

The town stands on a hilltop bluff high above a loop of the Torridge, with commons and steep wooded slopes falling away on three sides, which leaves it standing above everything around it. Wind loading is high from every direction as a result, not just the prevailing south-westerly, and driving rain finds any weakness in mortar and flashing readily, whichever quarter the weather happens to be coming from that day.

Because Great Torrington's elevated position means a stack here is tested from every direction rather than mainly one, a survey that photographs only the more sheltered or more visible face misses exactly the side most likely to be showing the real problem. A close aerial pass around every face of the stack matters more in a town built on a bluff like this than almost anywhere with a single, predictable weather direction.

Torrington Commons, running along the steep slopes below the bluff, and RHS Garden Rosemoor, a little further out, both sit well below the elevated position the town centre itself occupies, and Castle Hill offers about as clear a view as anywhere in this coverage area of just how far above the surrounding land Great Torrington actually stands. Dartington Crystal, within the town, is a rare surviving piece of the glassworks and creamery industry the town's Georgian and Victorian core grew up around.

Bideford, Barnstaple, Holsworthy and Okehampton are all within reasonable range of Great Torrington, and Barnstaple and Okehampton are covered on their own pages here, useful if a booking can be combined with a nearby job.

Corrugated metal on the outbuildings around the town carries essentially no traditional chimney stock, so a booking here is generally for one of the Georgian or Victorian buildings around the square rather than anything on the plateau's newer estates or the surrounding agricultural land.

The square's Georgian and Victorian stacks typically carry plain, functional pots consistent with a working market town rather than a resort, and the bluff's wind exposure from every direction means those pots and their flaunching joints are worked from more angles than a sheltered inland town's would ever be.

The square and the town centre are compact, and a survey here is generally launched from the commons just below the bluff rather than from the square itself, which also gives a clear sense of the elevated position already described.