Drone mapping services in Totnes

Totnes carries one of the better known brownfield regeneration sites in Devon, on former industrial ground near the station and the river, and brownfield of that kind is a different survey job to a greenfield allocation. There are existing structures, made ground, old surfaces at inconsistent levels, and a history of previous use that shapes everything drawn on top of it.

What a design team needs from a site like that is existing conditions in three dimensions: what stands, how tall it is, what the levels do across a yard, where the boundary walls actually run as opposed to where the deeds suggest.

The town climbs hard from the river to the castle, and the older core is dense, narrow and stacked. Flying over it means working with a lot of height change in a small footprint, and it means the sensible launch points are limited and worth identifying before the day.

For a plot on the hill, the terrain model matters as much as the map. Access, ramp gradients and the level a threshold has to sit at are all decided by a few tenths of a metre, and they are what a client is actually buying when they commission height data on a site like this.

The river here is tidal up to the town, which puts a moving waterline through a number of sites. Quay walls, slipways and any structure with a footing below high water are recorded at low tide or not at all, and the tide table decides the appointment.

The riverside is also where a good deal of the town's future development sits, so this is not an occasional constraint. It is the normal condition of a Totnes job.

A lot of the building stock here is old, protected and much altered. Recording a structure fully before it is changed costs very little at the time and is worth a great deal later, when somebody asks what was there beforehand.

The town is thirty five minutes from base down the A38, and a job usually combines a plan grid with a set of oblique passes, because almost nothing here is answered by a straight down view on its own.

The medieval core has slate-hung and jettied frontages that overhang the pavement, and an overhang is invisible from directly above. Anything projecting outward is recorded from an angle or not at all, which is the single most common reason a survey of an old town centre needs oblique passes rather than a grid.

Outside the town, the South Hams around Totnes carries substantial estates and parkland, and estate mapping is a steady part of the work in this area: field systems, tracks, woodland blocks, watercourses and the buildings scattered across a holding, flown as one dataset rather than as separate visits.

The town is also small enough that a client with several plots can have them all captured on one visit and processed separately, which is worth raising at the quoting stage. Flying is a small part of the cost on a job like that; the travel and the processing are the rest, and both scale better across a group of sites than they do one at a time.