Missing dog search in Dawlish

Dawlish Warren, the dune and nature reserve at the mouth of the estuary, is close to ideal drone-search terrain: open grass and low dune scrub with long sightlines and very little to properly hide behind, the sort of ground a search can clear in a fraction of the time a person walking the paths would take. A dog that has headed for the Warren from the town is usually found faster there than almost anywhere else on this list, simply because the ground gives the camera so little to work around.

Dawlish takes south-easterly gales that throw sea water clean over the wall, and the cliff-top bungalow estates above the town take unbroken wind with very little shelter. That means weather properly decides more of a search here than in most of the towns this site covers, and after a storm, rather than during one, is very often the realistic window for a flight rather than trying to fly through it.

Inland of the seafront, Dawlish sits in a narrow valley cut by the Dawlish Water, and a dog moving away from the coast tends to follow that valley rather than climb the exposed cliff tops either side of it, so the watercourse and the ground either side of it get checked early alongside the more open Warren.

The Regency and Victorian terraces around The Lawn, and the seafront hotels and apartment blocks nearby, are close, historic ground with limited private garden space, checked on foot before the search opens out. The extensive post-war bungalow development on the cliff tops is a different case: bungalow gardens here are often low-walled or open-plan rather than heavily fenced, which means a dog can leave one without an obvious gap to explain how, and it is worth checking the whole run of gardens along a cliff-top street rather than assuming a single point of escape.

The modern estates inland at Dawlish Warren sit close to the open dune ground covered above, and a dog loose from one of those addresses is often already close to the best searching ground this town has to offer. Teignmouth, Exeter, Newton Abbot and Exmouth are the nearest towns to widen towards if the immediate area does not turn anything up.

The sea wall and railway, and The Lawn along Dawlish Water, are useful reference points for anyone meeting the search on the ground, and the red sandstone cliffs either side of the town are treated with the same caution as any other unstable clifftop covered on this site, checked for safety as much as for the search itself.