Great Torrington drone survey, Devon

From our base in Exeter it's roughly 31.1 miles out to Great Torrington, towards the far side of our coverage. We'd normally get there via the A377 to Barnstaple direction and then the A386 down into town, and that's the road the drone, the cases and the rest of the kit travel down whenever a job in the EX38 area comes in.

Great Torrington bookings are priced off the address and the brief, not the postcode itself: the fixed price agreed before the visit is the same formula whether it's EX38 or Exeter.

A EX38 booking near Great Torrington is never held up by a crew travelling in from outside Devon, which keeps a weather reschedule a same-morning phone call rather than a lost day.

EX38 airspace gets the same pre-flight checks as North Devon generally: operator and flyer IDs confirmed, insurance current, before a Great Torrington job goes anywhere near the diary.

Around Great Torrington, EX38 included: A Georgian and Victorian centre around the square, terraced cottages, a glassworks and creamery industrial legacy, and post-war estates on the plateau. It's the kind of spread that means the brief changes street to street across North Devon.

A hilltop town standing on a bluff high above a loop of the Torridge, with commons and steep wooded slopes falling away on three sides. That's worth knowing before a Great Torrington visit, because it decides where the launch point sits in EX38, not whether the job can be done at all. Between Torrington Commons and Dartington Crystal, Great Torrington has enough going on in EX38 that most jobs read as properly local rather than a generic address on a form.

Older buildings around Great Torrington are usually a roof condition job first, with leak tracing brought in separately if there's already water coming through somewhere in EX38 and nobody has found where yet.

Great Torrington and its EX38 postcode sit inside North Devon, one of several groupings across Devon that decide which jobs get planned into the same working week.

Great Torrington is not a one-off EX38 booking for us, it's part of the North Devon round alongside Bideford, Barnstaple and Holsworthy, often flown on the same Great Torrington trip as one of those.

For a Great Torrington job specifically, the EX38 postcode tells us which North Devon run it fits into, and the dates tell us when to start looking at the weather.

Nothing about North Devon changes what happens after the flight. A written report within 48 hours goes out for Great Torrington the same way it does for a EX38 job right in Exeter.

The same run usually takes in Okehampton as well, and closer to Great Torrington itself, RHS Garden Rosemoor and Castle Hill viewpoint are the kind of landmarks that make an address easy to place before we've even driven out.