Drone chimney survey in Okehampton

Okehampton's town centre is built in granite and slate, with Victorian terraces carrying stacks worked in the same hard local stone rather than brick, and the surrounding parishes carry scattered moorland farms and longhouses with older, plainer stone stacks that have seen very little maintenance across long stretches of their working lives. A large stock of post-war housing around the centre carries more conventional brick and concrete tile chimneys.

The town sits at the northern foot of Dartmoor where the East and West Okement meet, with the high moor and Yes Tor rising immediately to the south, and Dartmoor forces Atlantic air upward right on the doorstep. Rainfall is high, driving rain is frequent, and roofs, and the stacks on them, stay wet for longer stretches here than almost anywhere else in this coverage area, which is a properly harsh environment for mortar and stone jointing to hold up against year after year.

A granite stack does not fail the way a brick one does, and reading whether stone-bedded ridge work or granite jointing has actually moved needs a resolution close enough to see the joint line clearly, which a ladder against an exposed moorland-edge stack in Okehampton's wind is not a safe way to get. A drone survey gets that close look from a standoff distance the weather here makes worth having.

Okehampton Castle and the wider Dartmoor National Park boundary sit immediately alongside the town, and Meldon Viaduct further out gives some sense of the scale of the moorland terrain this town borders directly. Yes Tor and High Willhays, the two highest points on Dartmoor, rise just south of the town centre, which is as good an explanation as any for why weather here arrives with so little warning and so little to slow it first.

Crediton, Tavistock and Holsworthy are all within reasonable range and covered on their own pages, useful if a booking on an outlying moorland farm near Okehampton can be combined with a nearby town survey.

Corrugated metal on the outlying farm buildings is about as far from the town's granite-bedded terraced stacks as a roof covering gets, and a booking on one of those scattered moorland farms is generally dealing with an older stone stack that has had a great deal less maintenance attention over the decades than anything in the town centre.

Granite terrace stacks in the town centre typically carry plain, functional pots bedded straight into the granite coursing, a harder-wearing but less forgiving arrangement than a mortar flaunching, since granite does not flex the way a softer material would as the stack settles over the decades.

The town centre sits below the open moor, and a launch point on the edge of town, closer to the moorland edge itself, is often more straightforward than one of the tighter Victorian terraced streets in the centre.