Drone chimney survey in Liskeard

Liskeard's Victorian centre was built on copper and tin wealth, with substantial stone and rendered buildings carrying well-built stacks in Delabole and natural slate, while terraced miners' cottages nearby carry a plainer, harder-worked version of the same stock, built to a tighter budget but with just as much exposure to the weather. Post-war and modern estates on the outskirts carry conventional brick and concrete tile chimneys.

The town sits on high ground between Bodmin Moor and the south Cornish coast, with steep valleys on its eastern side, and Bodmin Moor to the north keeps rainfall well above the regional average with driving rain from the south-west a near-constant feature through the winter months. A miners' cottage stack built to a modest original budget, worked by that level of exposure for well over a century, is an altogether different proposition to survey than a well-funded stack in a more sheltered inland town.

The plainer miners' cottage stacks around Liskeard were built for function rather than show, and decades of high rainfall exposure with modest original materials means a close, plain photographic record matters as much here as on any grander stack elsewhere in this coverage area, arguably more given how long some of this stock has gone without proper attention.

Stuart House and the Liskeard Public Hall sit within the Victorian centre this page has focused on, and the approach to Bodmin Moor to the north is close enough that its influence on the weather is felt in the town itself rather than only on the moor's own high ground. The Looe valley line, running south from the town, passes through some of the steepest of the eastern valleys mentioned already.

Saltash, Launceston and Plymouth are all within range of Liskeard, and Launceston is covered on its own page here, useful if a booking can be paired with a nearby survey.

Concrete tile on the newer estates on the outskirts is a straightforward covering with little in common with the Delabole and natural slate found on the Victorian mining-era buildings closer to the centre, where a stack junction is far more likely to need the kind of close reading this survey is built to give.

A miners' cottage stack typically carries a single plain pot, built to the same modest original budget as the rest of the cottage, in clear contrast to the more substantial dressed stone stacks on the town's grander Victorian buildings closer to the centre.

The town centre streets are narrow in places, and a survey of a miners' cottage stack on one of the steeper eastern valley streets is usually easier launched from slightly higher, more open ground nearby.