Yes, and the risk comes down the valley rather than in off the sea. About a fifth of postcodes carry a high rating on at least one flood measure. Roughly one in ten sits in the highest river-and-sea zone. Every flood on the recorded register came from a watercourse, not the tide. In a village strung along a valley floor with a beach at the end of it, the sea gets the blame and the stream does the work.
On the river-and-sea measure, the Environment Agency maps about 9% of this area's postcodes inside flood zone 3, the highest-probability band, and about 3% inside zone 2. Zone 2 being the smaller figure confuses people who assume the bands nest inside each other. They do not. Zone 2 is the additional medium-probability fringe lying beyond zone 3, so the small number is the shallow outer edge of the problem rather than a contradiction of the larger one.
Surface water is not published here as a separate share, but the shape of it is visible in the history. Around 3% of postcodes fall within historic flood outlines, and the Environment Agency's recorded register holds four events for this area. The most recent, in December 1960, is logged as an ordinary watercourse exceeding its channel capacity with no raised defences present. That is the failure mode of a steep valley: the water does not need a named river to arrive at your front door at speed.
Looking forward, the climate-adjusted extent covers about 15% of postcodes, against the roughly 9% mapped in zone 3 as things stand. That gap is the part of the village that is dry now and modelled as wet later.
For insurance, this matters more than most buyers expect. A high-risk address changes the premium, the excess, and sometimes whether cover is offered at all, and it can complicate a mortgage offer late in the process. Get an indicative quote against the exact address before you instruct a solicitor, not after.
Taking every indicator together, including surface water, about 22% of postcodes rate high on at least one measure, roughly 10% medium and around 30% low. Those bands overlap with the zone figures above rather than adding to them, and a postcode can appear in both.
Counted as homes rather than postcodes, the picture is sharper. The Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping lists 36 postcodes here that carry some risk, containing 591 properties. Within those, 127 are rated high risk, 38 medium, 52 low and 2 very low, and 89 of the high-risk properties are residential. Postcodes with no risk at all do not appear in that list, so this is the exposed slice of the village, not the whole of it.
On whether anything stands between the water and the house, roughly 9% of postcodes sit inside a high-risk extent with a defence present in the model, and roughly 9% sit inside a high-risk extent with no defence modelled at all. Another 12% fall in an undefended low-risk extent. Defended is a description of the model, not a promise about your kitchen floor, and a defence being present says nothing about the standard it was built to or the state it is in now.
The coast is close enough to matter. About 21% of postcodes fall within 500 metres of the shoreline, that being a threshold the mapping uses rather than a statement about any single address, with the nearest postcode roughly 90 metres from the water and the median around 1,100 metres.
Every postcode here falls under a shoreline management plan, and the stated policy is hold the line across the 20, 50 and 100-year horizons. That is an intention to maintain defence of the current shoreline, not a guarantee that funding will follow, and not evidence that a defence already exists where you are standing.
At the nearest tide gauge, Devonport, the record from 1962 to 2015 measured sea level rising at about 2.35 millimetres a year. That is a historic measured rate over half a century, not a projection.
Flooding is the weakest card in Combe Martin's hand. The valley that gives the village its shape also gives the water somewhere to go, and any buyer looking at a property on the low ground should treat the flood check as a first-week task rather than a conveyancing formality.