Aerial survey of land and sites around South Molton

This is livestock country, and animals are a live consideration on any survey here rather than an afterthought. A drone at survey height is well clear of anything on the ground, but take off and landing happen at head height in a field, and that is where cattle take an interest.

The answer is simple and it is agreed beforehand: launch from a yard, a gateway or an empty parcel rather than from the middle of a grazing field, and time the visit so the ground being surveyed is not the one being moved through. It costs nothing to arrange and it avoids the only awkward moment in a day like this.

The Mole and the Bray have cut deep, wooded, steep-sided valleys through this ground, and holdings regularly run from the top of one side down to the water and up the other. That is a genuine planning problem, because a single flight height cannot serve both the top and the bottom well.

Splitting the parcel into runs with separate take off heights solves it. So does flying a corridor along the valley rather than a grid across it, where the feature of interest is the watercourse and its banks. Which of those is right depends on what you want out, which is why the brief comes before the price.

The field pattern here is old and fine grained: small parcels, thick Devon banks with mature trees standing in them, and more metres of boundary per acre than almost anywhere else on this list. For an orthomosaic that is good news, because the boundary is exactly what people want to see.

It does mean a bank with a full canopy on it reads as canopy rather than as bank in a surface model. Where the height of a bank matters, the winter months once the leaf is off produce a far more useful capture than midsummer does.

Exmoor sits to the north, and it makes this a wet corner of the county with long wetting periods and a low cloud base more often than the forecast suggests. Hill fog on the moor edge does not always show up in a town forecast fifteen miles away.

That is worth allowing for in any booking made between November and February. The flying days exist; they are just fewer, and they tend to arrive with less notice than a diary likes.

There is a steady stream of barn conversion and farmstead development in the surrounding parishes, and the ground around those buildings is what usually needs recording: the yard, the access, the drainage, and what the parcel looked like before anyone started.

A dated capture before works begin is cheap and there is no way to go back for it later. That is the single most common reason this service gets booked in these parishes.