Roofers in Yelverton

South and west of the roundabout, Yelverton was settled in late Victorian and Edwardian times, and the houses are big villas with big roofs: long runs of valley and hip, tall stacks and slate that has been on since the house was built. In the war the down became RAF Harrowbeer, and a nineteenth-century terrace by the airfield, now mostly shops, had its upper storey taken off to give the aircraft an easier approach. Later houses fill in between. On a villa that size a re-slate is a big job, and usually a once-in-a-lifetime one, so it pays to know which slopes need it now and which have years left in them. The villages around it are older and smaller. Buckland Monachorum and Meavy grew round their churches and are both conservation areas; Horrabridge grew up round its fifteenth-century packhorse bridge over the Walkham. Down towards the Tamar, Bere Alston and Bere Ferrers sit on their peninsula at the end of narrow lanes, and Calstock, over the river in Cornwall, is inside the Cornish mining World Heritage Site.

Yelverton is about 190 metres up on open down, higher and more exposed than anywhere in the city, on the edge of a moor whose high ground gets over 2,000 millimetres of rain a year. Big old slate roofs here have been through a lot of winters: the slates are usually fine, the nails and the felt are not, and a chimney stack that has stood on an exposed ridge for a hundred years will want its flaunching and pointing looked at.

Yelverton, Crapstone, Clearbrook, Dousland, Meavy and Horrabridge are inside Dartmoor National Park, so the Park Authority, not the district council, deals with planning there. Buckland Monachorum, Milton Combe and the Bere peninsula are West Devon's and sit in the Tamar Valley National Landscape, and Calstock is Cornwall Council's. Buckland Monachorum, Milton Combe, Meavy, Horrabridge, Bere Alston and Bere Ferrers each have a conservation area. A like-for-like repair or re-slate is normally fine in all of them; a change of material is what to check first. Long drives and lanes are common, and we plan access on the free roof check.

Yelverton, Crapstone, Buckland Monachorum, Milton Combe, Meavy, Clearbrook, Dousland, Horrabridge, Roborough and Bickleigh, with Bere Alston, Bere Ferrers and Calstock covered from here. For the city itself, see the Plymouth page.