Aerial survey of land and sites around Totnes

The land around this town includes substantial estate holdings, and an estate is a different survey problem from a farm. The ground is spread out, parts of it are tenanted, parts are in hand, and the parcels that matter are often the awkward ones: woodland edges, riverbank, tracks, buildings let separately.

A whole-estate capture is therefore planned as a set of runs with a shared standard rather than as one grid. Same height, same overlap, one visit where the weather allows, so that the pieces can be laid together afterwards and read as one record.

Old parkland and estate woodland here carry mature and veteran trees, and a big crown hides a surprising amount of ground. The surface model follows the top of the canopy, and there is no processing that recovers the ground beneath a tree that was in full leaf when the frames were taken.

For tree work specifically that is fine, because the crown is the subject: extent, form, deadwood at the top, gaps opening in a canopy. For anything about the ground under the trees, the flight belongs in winter, and even then a dense evergreen block will not give it up.

The river is the tidal limit here, and riverbank ground is the part of an estate most likely to be argued over: erosion, slumping, moorings, access and where exactly the boundary sits in relation to the water.

An aerial capture is good evidence for all of that except the last one. It shows the bank as it is, on a date, at a state of tide that gets recorded with the survey. It does not draw the boundary, and a survey that claimed to would be worth less than one that does not.

The town itself climbs steeply from the river, and the surrounding South Hams farmland rolls hard enough that few parcels are level. As elsewhere on this list, that means split runs or terrain-aware planning rather than a single flat grid over the lot.

The compensation is that the country is sheltered by Devon standards. Inland and away from the moor, the flying window here is longer through the winter than almost anywhere else covered by this site.

There is a lot of small-scale land use around this town: smallholdings, market garden ground, community and food-growing projects on parcels of a few acres. Those are quick jobs and they suit an aerial capture well, because the whole holding fits in a single frame set and the detail is fine enough to plan from.

The usual reasons are practical: laying out beds and tracks, planning drainage and shelter, applying for something that needs a current plan, or simply having a picture of the ground that is not four years out of date.