Drone chimney survey in Launceston

Launceston's walled medieval core, above the Kensey valley with the castle motte at its summit, carries Georgian frontages over slate-hung and rendered townhouses, and it is this slate hanging, applied to whole elevations including the stack faces exposed to the weather, that is the town's most distinctive stock feature. Victorian terraces sit on the slopes below the old core, and modern estates and industrial units on the flatter ground by the A30 carry plainer, conventional chimneys.

The town sits high and open, catching weather off both Bodmin Moor to the south-west and Dartmoor across the Devon border, and wind-driven rain from the south-west is the defining condition here, which is precisely why slate hanging on exposed elevations became so common in the first place: it is a direct, practical answer to that specific weather. A slate-hung stack face relies on every slate and every fixing behind it being sound, and a single displaced or cracked slate on a stack can let water track behind the hanging in a way that is easy to miss from below.

Because slate hanging is applied over the stack rather than being the stack's structural surface itself, a fault here can be hidden behind sound-looking slates rather than visible as an obvious crack, which makes a close, high resolution photograph noticeably more useful in Launceston than in a town where the stack surface is plain, visible brick throughout.

Launceston Castle, at the summit of the old motte, and St Mary Magdalene Church anchor the walled core this page has focused on, while the Launceston Steam Railway runs out along the Kensey valley into the more open countryside beyond the town's historic walls. The A30 corridor, on the flatter ground to the south, carries the modern estates and industrial units that sit well away from the slate-hung stock in the old town centre.

Bude, Holsworthy, Tavistock and Liskeard are all within range of Launceston, and Tavistock and Liskeard are covered on their own pages here, worth knowing if a booking can be combined with a nearby survey.

Concrete tile on the modern estates by the A30 handles a stack junction in the straightforward, standardised way any modern roof does, in clear contrast to the slate-hung elevations in the walled old town, where the hanging itself is as much a part of the stack's weatherproofing as the roof covering it sits beside.

A slate-hung stack in the old walled town often carries its pots set back slightly from the face of the hanging itself, and checking whether the hanging around the base of a pot is still properly lapped and fixed is as important here as checking the pot's own condition.

The steep streets inside the old town walls are narrow, and a survey of a slate-hung stack in the historic core is generally launched from just outside the walls, on the flatter ground near the castle approach.