Drone chimney survey in Wellington

Wellington's Georgian and Victorian centre carries a strong woollen mill legacy, with terraced mill housing built to house workers close to the Tonedale mill buildings, and their stacks are consistent with that industrial-era terrace stock: brick, functional, often serving several flues per shaft rather than one house one chimney. The former mill buildings themselves carry large-span roofs with their own substantial stacks, and substantial post-war and modern estates spreading north and east carry plainer, later chimneys.

The town sits at the foot of the Blackdown Hills, with the Wellington Monument standing on the escarpment above and the Tone valley to the north, and that escarpment immediately south produces marked wind acceleration over the town whenever a south-westerly is blowing. The higher streets, nearer the escarpment, feel that acceleration far more than the valley floor does, which means two stacks a short distance apart within the same town can actually be experiencing quite different wind loads.

Given how much the escarpment's wind acceleration varies by exactly where a street sits in relation to it, a survey here is worth thinking about street by street rather than assuming the whole town shares one exposure level. A close aerial pass gets that local detail correctly, whether the stack in question is on a sheltered valley-floor terrace or a higher street feeling the full effect of the hills above.

The Wellington Monument, standing on the escarpment above the town, gives a clear vantage point over the whole valley and a fair sense of just how exposed the higher ground really is compared with the sheltered Tone valley floor below. Tonedale Mills, within the town itself, is the clearest surviving evidence of the woollen mill trade that built the terraced housing this page has focused on, and Wellington Park sits closer to the valley floor, in calmer conditions than the escarpment above.

Taunton, Cullompton, Tiverton and Chard are all within range of Wellington, and Chard is covered on its own page here, useful if a booking can be combined with a nearby survey.

The large-span roofs on the former mill buildings themselves carry substantial stacks of their own, quite different in scale to the terraced mill housing nearby, and a survey of one of those former industrial buildings is a noticeably bigger job than a single terrace house, worth mentioning when booking.

The former mill buildings carry substantially larger stacks with multiple pots serving what were once industrial boiler flues rather than domestic hearths, a different scale of structure entirely to the terraced mill housing nearby, and a survey of one naturally takes longer than a single house's chimney would.

The town centre and the former mill buildings sit close together, and a survey of a mill building's larger stack generally needs the same kind of open ground nearby that the terraced housing survey would use.