Yes, in places, and the places are the ones anyone with eyes would guess. The Coly runs straight through the middle and has a long record of doing so enthusiastically. Roughly one postcode in six carries a high rating on at least one flood measure. Most of the area sits well outside the river-and-sea zones altogether. This is not a flooded town, it is a town with a wet seam running through it, and which side of that seam you buy on decides whether any of this is your problem.
Start with rivers and the sea, because that is the measure conveyancers and insurers reach for first. About 3% of the area's postcodes sit in the Environment Agency's flood zone 3, the high-probability band, and about 11% sit in zone 2. Those two are separate bands rather than one inside the other, zone 2 being the additional medium-probability fringe lying beyond zone 3, so the smaller number is the more serious one. Read them the wrong way round and the risk looks twice as broad and half as sharp as it is.
Surface water does not get its own clean share here. It is folded into the combined postcode indicators further down, alongside rivers and the sea, so no separate rainwater-only figure exists for this area. What does exist is history: 73 flood events are on the recorded register for the Colyton area, the most recent in 1968, logged as the main river carrying more water than its channel could take, with no raised defences in the picture.
Looking forward rather than back, the climate-adjusted river-and-sea zone covers about 16% of postcodes. That is the mapping's allowance for a wetter century, and it is a materially wider footprint than the zones as they stand today.
For insurance, none of this makes cover impossible, and it does make it a question rather than a formality. A property inside a zone or a recorded flood outline can attract a higher premium, a higher excess specific to flood, or a request for the claims history before anything is quoted. The industry-backed flood reinsurance scheme that supports cover for higher-risk homes does not apply to properties built since 2009, so a newer house on a wet plot has fewer places to hide. Get an indicative quote before instructing a solicitor rather than after exchange.
Across the whole set of postcode indicators, which fold surface water in with rivers and sea, about 16% of the area's postcodes rate high on at least one measure, about 10% rate medium, and about 34% rate low. Those bands overlap with the zone figures above rather than adding to them, and a postcode can land in the high band on one indicator while sitting outside the river-and-sea zones entirely.
Counting homes rather than postcodes sharpens it considerably. In the 29 postcodes that carry any rating at all under the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping, 651 properties are covered: 55 at high risk, 15 at medium, 55 at low and 37 at very low, with 9 of the high-risk properties being residential. Postcodes with no rating do not appear in that list at all, so this is the affected slice of the town rather than the whole of it.
On whether anything stands between the water and the walls, close to 1% of postcodes fall inside the modelled high-risk extent with no defence present in the model, and close to half of one percent fall inside it with a defence present. Present in the model means present in the model. It records that something has been built, not that the house behind it stays dry.
Every postcode here sits within a shoreline management plan area, with the nearest coastline about 555 metres from the closest postcode and a median distance of roughly 2.2 kilometres. The stated policy over the 20, 50 and 100 year horizons is managed realignment, meaning the intention is to let the shoreline move rather than to hold it where it is. A policy is a statement of intent about future decisions, not a wall, and not a promise to fund one.
At the nearest tide gauge, at Devonport, the measured rate of sea level rise across the 1962 to 2015 record runs at about 2.35 millimetres a year. That is what has already been recorded there over half a century, not a projection of what happens next.
Water is the clearest weakness in this area's data, concentrated rather than general, which is precisely what makes it dangerous to shrug at. Two houses a few hundred metres apart here can have entirely different insurance conversations, and only one of them finds that out at the survey.