Aerial survey of land and sites around Cullompton

After the valleys either side of it, the Culm floor is easy country to survey. Level ground means a flight plan holds a consistent height over the whole parcel, detail stays even across the block, and the arithmetic on how much a battery covers actually holds up.

The land use is mixed: arable and grass on the valley floor, the Blackdowns rising to the east, and a steady supply of development and infrastructure work along the motorway corridor. All three want the same underlying capture and different outputs from it.

A valley bottom that holds damp and frost also holds fog, and the Culm produces plenty of it on clear autumn and winter mornings. It burns off, but not always by the time somebody has driven to a site with a booking in the diary.

So a winter survey here is planned late morning rather than first thing, and the visit moves rather than being flown through murk that leaves half the parcel missing from the model. Low winter sun matters too: long shadows across a flat field hide ground that the model needs to see, and mid-day light in December is worth more than an early start.

The junction 28 corridor keeps producing sites: distribution and light industrial ground, allocated land on the edge of the town, road and drainage works to serve them. This is the type of ground where volumes get argued about, because material moves on and off it continuously and everybody has a different recollection of what was there in March.

Two surveys flown on the same plan settle that. The difference between the surfaces is checkable against what went over the weighbridge, and the base surface each one was measured against is written on the front of the report rather than assumed.

The farms have not gone anywhere. Between the estates there are dairy and arable holdings with the usual mix of clamps, yards and outlying fields, and their surveys run the same way as anywhere else in Mid Devon.

What is unusual here is how often a single flight covers both worlds: a field boundary on one side of the frame and a service yard on the other. Where a job spans the two, the report separates what was captured for the agricultural side from what was captured for the site, so the right half can be forwarded on without explanation.

The slopes either side of the Culm carry a fair amount of installed ground: arrays on south-facing fields, their access tracks, inverter stations and stock fencing. From the gateway an array is almost impossible to photograph usefully. From above it reads as rows, and the things that matter show up at once.

What an aerial survey covers on a site like that is the layout, the access, the drainage and the state of the grass and scrub between and under the panels, plus where water stands after heavy rain. What it does not cover is the electrical condition of the panels themselves, which is a thermal job with a different camera on a different flight, and there is a separate site in this group set up for exactly that.