Storm damage roof inspection in Ilfracombe

Ilfracombe is wedged between steep hills and high cliffs on the north Devon coast, with the ground falling sharply to a small sheltered harbour and Hillsborough rising immediately east. Full north-coast exposure to Atlantic gales and salt hits a town built on steep ground, where the pitch of the streets themselves affects how wind behaves around a roofline in ways a flat seafront town does not experience.

The dramatic hillside rows of Victorian resort terraces and hotels, many rendered and painted, were built to be admired from below and from the sea, which is exactly the vantage point that shows a storm-damaged roofline least well.

That view-from-below problem is worth stating plainly: a photograph taken from the harbour or from a boat, however dramatic the hillside looks, tells an insurer almost nothing useful about the condition of an individual roof three or four rows up, because the angle simply does not resolve the detail a claim needs.

Flat and mansard roofs on hotel conversions, along with parapets and hidden gutters on the terraces, mean a storm-caused blockage or a lifted lead detail routinely shows itself first as a stain on a top-floor ceiling rather than as anything visible from the street below. By the time a guest or a resident reports the stain, the storm that actually caused it may be a week or more in the past.

Harbourside cottages and slate-hung elevations facing the Atlantic side of the town see more conventional storm damage, hung slates lifting under driving rain, but on ground this steep even a straightforward slipped slate can be hard to reach for a close look.

Ilfracombe Harbour itself sits below most of the exposed hillside stock this page describes, and a flight covering the terraces above it typically takes in the harbourside cottages in the same pass. South Molton, well inland over the hill, takes a distinctly quieter version of the same storm.

Because the interval between a storm and someone actually noticing damage in Ilfracombe is often longer than the storm itself, a flown survey booked promptly after a named event, rather than after a stain has appeared, is what actually ties the evidence to the right storm rather than to whichever one happened most recently before the ceiling was noticed.

For hotel and guest house operators managing several converted properties on the steep hillside rows, a single flight covering the block gets every roof recorded without anyone needing scaffold access on ground this difficult.

Capstone Hill, overlooking the harbour from the opposite side to Hillsborough, takes its own version of the same steep-ground exposure, and Tunnels Beaches close to the town centre sits within the same EX34 postcode as the hillside terraces most affected after a storm. Barnstaple, inland along the coast road, is a noticeably calmer booking by comparison.