Missing dog search in Cullompton

Cullompton sits on flat ground in the Culm valley, right beside the M5 corridor, with the Blackdown Hills to the east and rolling Mid Devon farmland to the west. The flat, open nature of the ground either side of the town is properly good for a drone search, wide fields with clear boundaries that the aircraft can cover fast, but the motorway changes the priority: a dog anywhere near it is an urgent safety concern in its own right, and that gets checked and reported on first, before anything else.

Once the motorway corridor is accounted for, the search works the flat farmland either side of it in the same methodical, field-by-field way as anywhere else with this kind of open ground.

The Culm valley floor holds damp air and frost more readily than the higher ground around it, and cold, still, frosty conditions are some of the best a thermal camera gets, because the ground temperature drops well below a dog's body heat and the contrast is sharp and easy to read. A search timed for a cold morning here, once any fog has cleared, tends to produce a particularly clear thermal picture.

The medieval and Georgian core along Fore Street gives way quickly to cob and thatch lanes and then open farmland, so a dog missing from the older part of town does not have far to travel before it is in really open, huntable ground, which is exactly where a drone search adds the most over a search on foot.

Cullompton's medieval and Georgian core along Fore Street carries cob and thatch cottages in tight lanes, noticeably older and more enclosed ground than the large volume of late twentieth century estate housing that surrounds it and the new-build expansion still continuing on the edges of the town. A dog loose from one of the older lanes is checked through that close, historic tangle first; one loose from a newer estate is more likely to be working its way along the modern street pattern towards the motorway corridor or the open Culm valley beyond it.

Knowing which kind of address the dog went missing from changes where the first pass concentrates, before the search opens out onto the flat farmland either side of the M5 covered above. Tiverton, Exeter, Honiton and Wellington are the nearest towns to widen towards if the search needs to grow.

St Andrew's Church and The Walronds, close to Fore Street, are useful meeting points if several people are converging on the search from different directions, and the M5 at junction 28 is checked first and specifically for the reason given above, ahead of the wider Culm valley farmland either side of it.