Roofers in Ivybridge

The old centre follows the river, where Stowford paper mill worked from 1787 to 2013 and the granite bridge the town is named after still stands. The older houses are stone or brick with slate-hung fronts and end walls, stuccoed villas under low-pitched slate roofs, and here and there scantle slate, the small slates laid in diminishing courses that you find on older Devon roofs. Beside the railway, the granite piers of Brunel's 1848 viaduct still stand next to the one that replaced it in 1892. After the A38 bypass was finished in 1974 the town began to grow, and in the 1980s and 1990s it more than doubled, from about 5,100 people in 1981 to about 12,000 by 2001. Most of Ivybridge now is the housing from those years: semis, detached houses and terraces under concrete tile, the older ones now due a look at their ridges, felt and flat-roofed garages and porches, the newer ones at the stage of a slipped tile after a gale or a gutter that was never hung to a fall.

The Erme comes into the town at about 91 metres and leaves at about 40, straight off the slopes of Dartmoor, and the valley sides catch the wind and the rain the moor sends down. Moss grows fast on north-facing slopes, gutters under the trees by the river fill in a single autumn, and a flat roof that holds water gets plenty of practice at leaking.

The town itself is South Hams District Council's for planning and sits just outside Dartmoor National Park; Cornwood, on this page's patch, is inside it, so there the Park Authority decides. Ivybridge has had a conservation area since 1985, and Ermington one since 1976. Like-for-like roof repairs and re-roofs need no permission either way; a change of material, or roof windows on a street-facing slope, is the thing to check first. Most newer roofs are reached easily from drives; the older streets by the river are tighter.

Ivybridge, the old centre along the Erme and the estates around it, with Cornwood, Lee Mill, Lutton and Ermington covered from here. Plympton, back towards the city, has its own page.