Storm damage roof inspection in Dartmouth

Dartmouth is a deep-water port on the west bank of the Dart, built on ground so steep that streets become stairs, with the castle and the river mouth to the south giving real shelter from the worst of the open sea. What the town does not have is any shelter between one building and the next: the steep-stacked layout means one roof frequently discharges towards its neighbour downhill, so a storm-caused blockage or overflow on one property can send water directly at the roof or wall of the building immediately below it.

That neighbour-to-neighbour water routing is a local storm risk, distinct from a straightforward wind-driven failure, and it means damage attributed to 'my roof' after a storm sometimes actually originates on next door's.

Dartmouth Castle, at the mouth of the river below the town, sits in the most directly exposed position of any building here, a useful reference for how much shelter the steep-stacked layout gives everything built further up the hill behind it.

The timber-framed and jettied merchant houses around Bayards Cove and the Butterwalk are an exceptional survival, and their lead-lined valleys and gutters, built into complex historic roof junctions, are exactly the kind of detail a storm exploits when overloaded by water arriving from a neighbour's roof as well as its own. Georgian and Victorian terraces climbing the hill above see more straightforward slate and slate-hung storm damage, in line with the rest of this stretch of coast.

For listed buildings especially, establishing precisely where a storm-caused failure originated matters for how any repair is consented, since a conservation officer will want to know whether the fault sits on the building being repaired or on the one uphill from it.

Because the failure on one roof in Dartmouth can originate on the property above it, a flown survey that captures the relationship between neighbouring roofs on the hillside, not just the roof in isolation, gives a far more useful record than a single property's photographs taken alone.

Nothing about that survey touches historic fabric, which matters on Grade II buildings where any physical access is itself a conversation with the conservation officer before a single ladder goes anywhere near the roof.

The Britannia Royal Naval College dominates the skyline from its position on high ground above the town, in the same TQ6 postcode as the merchant houses down at Bayards Cove, and the difference in exposure between the two ends of that short walk is exactly the kind of variation a single ground-level description would miss. Totnes, up the Dart valley, is a considerably calmer address.