Drone survey in Sherborne

Sherborne is around an hour and ten minutes from Exeter via the A30 and A303, the longest run of any town covered as a matter of routine, and the one place where booking a week or two out makes more sense than chasing the next available slot. It is still treated as ordinary work rather than a special trip, and the price quoted for the survey has that longer drive built into it from the start.

What makes Sherborne worth a mention on its own is how consistent the historic centre is: hamstone runs through the abbey, the two castles, the school buildings and most of the townhouses around them, a different kind of uniformity to the mix of building eras seen in most towns on this list. Properties here often sit close to much larger institutional buildings, the abbey, the school, with far bigger and more complicated roofs than an ordinary house nearby, so the scale of what a survey is looking at can change a great deal from one booking to the next even within the same short walk.

A lot of the abbey and school roofing is lead rather than tile or slate, laid over parapets and valleys where a failure tends to develop slowly and gets expensive by the time it shows from the ground. Checking that kind of roof from above, without anyone needing to get up onto it, is a plainly different job to surveying one of the newer estates on the town's northern edge, and both fall well within routine work here.

Sherborne Old Castle and the newer castle across the water meadows sit either side of Pageant Gardens, and the town has grown up around that parkland rather than over it, so a fair amount of open ground sits close to the centre in a way that is unusual for a town of Sherborne's size. That layout means a property near the centre can still be next to a wide, open flight path, which is a small practical point in favour of booking here rather than a complication.

Sherborne sits in the Yeo valley on gently rising hamstone country, sheltered enough that it sees less rain across a year than most of Devon does. That makes weather less of a factor in scheduling here than in some of the more exposed towns further west in this coverage area, which helps offset the longer drive when it comes to fitting a Sherborne booking into the working week. Between the shelter and the drier climate, a Sherborne booking is rarely the one held up by weather once it has been fitted into the diary.