Drone survey in Launceston

Launceston is in Cornwall, not Devon, but the A30 puts it around an hour and ten minutes from Exeter, a similar run to several Devon towns set further back from the coast. Covering the wider South West alongside the whole of Devon means a booking here is priced and scheduled the same way as one in Okehampton or Tavistock; there is no premium for crossing the county line.

The old county town of Cornwall sits on a hilltop above the Kensey valley, with the castle motte at the top and Bodmin Moor rising beyond it. Inside the walled medieval core the buildings mix Georgian frontages with slate-hung townhouses, while the flatter ground out towards the A30 carries more recent estates and industrial units.

That split between a historic centre and a modern edge is a pattern that turns up across a lot of the towns on this list, and it means the survey types requested here range just as widely, from a period townhouse to a commercial unit on the industrial estate.

Launceston Steam Railway and St Mary Magdalene Church bring a steady flow of visitors to a town that is otherwise a working market centre rather than a resort, and that mix supports a number of guest houses and bed and breakfasts alongside the ordinary housing stock. A building used partly for letting rooms tends to need a wider look at the whole structure rather than a single-purpose roof check, which is where a fuller inspection earns its place over a narrower survey.

Launceston sits between Bude, Holsworthy, Tavistock and Liskeard, close to the boundary between Devon's coverage and Cornwall's, and a booking here can sit either side of a day that also takes in Devon towns to the east or Cornwall towns further west. That edge position is exactly what the wider South West coverage exists for.

Bodmin Moor rises immediately to the south-west of the town and Dartmoor is not far off to the east, so Launceston sits in the gap between two of the South West's largest areas of open country. That position brings a steady trickle of rural bookings from both directions, farms and smallholdings tucked into the moorland fringe on either side, which is exactly the kind of countryside work the wider South West side of this coverage exists for.

The PL15 postcode area takes in the town itself and a wide spread of parishes either side of the A30 corridor, farmhouses and smallholdings as much as the streets inside the old walls. A trip out to Launceston can reasonably combine a town-centre building with a rural property a short drive beyond it, in the same way a trip to a Devon market town would.