Carlyon Bay has a beach in its name and almost no flood risk to go with it. None of it sits in the river and sea flood zones. Nothing here carries a recorded flood history. One postcode appears on the rivers-and-sea risk list at all, with 2 properties flagged inside it. For a place this close to the water, that is a remarkably boring answer, and boring is what you want from this question.
The Environment Agency's flood zones do not reach this area. Zone 3, the higher-probability band, covers 0% of the postcodes here. Zone 2, which is the additional medium-probability fringe lying beyond zone 3 rather than wrapped around it, covers 0% as well. Both bands come back empty, which is not something most coastal addresses in England can say.
Surface water is the risk those zones were never designed to capture, being the kind that runs off the hill and down the road rather than rising out of a river. It does not have its own mapped extent for this area. Where it shows up at all, it shows up folded into the postcode-level indicator further down, and it accounts for most of what little gets flagged.
Adding the climate change allowance to the zone mapping changes nothing: 0% of postcodes fall inside the climate-adjusted extent. The forward look is as empty as the current one.
For insurance, an address with no flood zone and no logged flood history is the straightforward case at renewal, with standard cover and standard questions rather than a specialist scheme. The exception is the small number of properties that do appear on the rivers-and-sea mapping, where a broker will want the exact address rather than the postcode. Insurers price a building, not a view.
On the broader postcode indicator, which flags a postcode if it rates on at least one measure and folds surface water in alongside rivers and sea, 3% come out high, 6% medium and 27% low. Those bands overlap with the flood-zone picture rather than adding to it, so the two sets of figures describe the same coastline through different lenses.
Counted as properties rather than postcodes, the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping lists 26 properties across the single postcode here that carries any risk at all. Of those, 2 are rated high, with none at medium and none at low. Neither of the two high-rated properties is residential. Postcodes carrying no risk never appear on that list, which is why the total is so small: this is the flagged corner, not the whole area.
On whether anything stands between the water and the buildings, the modelled extents put 0% of postcodes inside a high-risk extent with a defence present in the model, and 0% inside one without. Nothing here falls inside a modelled extent either way. Worth knowing for elsewhere: "defended" means a defence exists in the model, not that a house behind it is safe.
The water is genuinely close. About 76% of postcodes sit within 500 metres of the coast, which is a threshold the mapping uses rather than a claim about any particular front door. The median distance is roughly 350 metres, and the nearest postcode sits about 70 metres from the sea.
The shoreline management policy for this frontage is no active intervention, and that is the stated position across the twenty, fifty and hundred-year horizons. A policy is an intention about maintaining defences, not a defence that exists and not a promise about the future, and this particular intention is to let the coast get on with whatever it plans to do. Anyone buying within sight of the water should sit with that sentence for a moment.
The nearest long-running tide gauge, at Devonport, recorded sea level rising about 2.35 millimetres a year across its 1962 to 2015 record. That is a measured historic rate over that period, not a prediction about the next one.
As for history, 0% of the area falls inside a recorded historic flood extent. Nothing has been logged. That is real reassurance rather than a technicality, though it is a record of what has been recorded rather than proof that water has never once come up a driveway here.
Flooding sits near the bottom of the list of things to worry about at this address, and what caveats exist are long-horizon ones rather than next-winter ones. Empty flood zones and a blank history on one side, a couple of flagged non-residential properties and an undefended coastline on the other.