Yes, in part, and the risk sits exactly where the appeal does. Most of the village is nowhere near a flood zone. A narrow band along the water is another matter. The sea is close to almost every front door here. Flooding in Downderry is not a village-wide problem, it is a front-row problem, and the front row is the reason people buy.
Start with rivers and the sea. The Environment Agency's flood zones cover about 3% of this area's postcodes in zone 3, the higher-probability band, and about 3% in zone 2, the additional medium-probability fringe that sits beyond zone 3 rather than containing it. Two small bands, not one nested inside the other, and together they describe a thin strip rather than a village.
Surface water is measured differently and does not get its own published share in this data. It is folded into the postcode-level indicators further down, so anyone treating the flood-zone figures as the whole answer is reading only the river-and-sea half of it.
Looking forward, the Environment Agency also models the zones with a climate-change allowance applied, and on that basis the share of postcodes inside a flood zone rises to about 8%. Still a minority of the village, and still concentrated in the same place.
For insurance, what matters is the address rather than the village. A property inside a mapped high-risk extent can expect a different conversation with an insurer than one on the lane above it: higher premiums, higher excesses, and questions about previous claims. An indicative quote on the specific address, obtained before a solicitor is instructed rather than after, costs nothing and settles the argument.
The postcode-level indicators fold surface water in alongside rivers and sea, and they rate a postcode on its worst measure. About 22% of postcodes here rate high on at least one measure, about 8% medium, and about 19% low. Those bands overlap the flood-zone shares above rather than adding to them, because they answer a broader question about several types of water at once.
Counted as homes rather than postcodes, the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping lists 189 properties across the 8 postcodes here that carry any risk at all. Of those, 9 are at high risk, 3 at medium and 7 at low, with 3 of the high-risk properties being residential. Postcodes with no risk do not appear in that list at all, so this is a picture of the exposed edge, not of the village.
On whether anything stands in the way, the modelled extents are unflattering. About 3% of postcodes sit inside a high-risk extent with a defence present in the model, and about 3% sit inside a high-risk extent with no defence in the model. A defence appearing in a model is not the same as a house being safe: it describes what has been mapped, not what will hold.
Proximity is the underlying fact. About 97% of postcodes here fall within 500 metres of the coast, which is the threshold the data uses rather than a claim about any one address, and the median postcode sits about 150 metres from the water. The closest is 39 metres.
Every postcode here is covered by a shoreline management plan, and the stated policy at the 20, 50 and 100-year horizons is no active intervention. That is an intention rather than a promise, and what it intends is to let the coast do what the coast does. It is not a defence, and there is no schedule attached to it.
The nearest tide gauge, at Devonport, recorded sea level rising by about 2.35 millimetres a year across its record from 1962 to 2015. That is a measured historic rate over a long run of years, not a forecast for this stretch of shore.
No historic flooding is recorded in this area, which is genuinely worth something after a coastline this exposed. It is not proof that nothing has ever happened here, only that nothing has made it into the record.
Flood risk is the weakest thing about Downderry, and the weakness is specific rather than general: a small, identifiable band of homes carries almost all of it, sitting on a coast that no one has undertaken to defend. Get the individual address mapped before falling for the view.