Felsted has a modest flood risk, and the River Chelmer is the smaller part of it. None of the village's postcodes fall inside the river and sea flood zones. A handful flag high once surface water joins the count. No past flood is on record. The danger here comes in patches, one address at a time.
Felsted lies on the north bank of the Chelmer, and the Environment Agency's flood zone mapping still puts 0% of its postcodes in flood zone 3, the highest-probability band for rivers and the sea, and 0% in zone 2, the medium-probability fringe beyond it. For a village with a river along one side, that is a clean sheet. The Chelmer gave the valley its shape and has so far kept its water to itself.
Surface water is a separate problem, and the zone maps never measure it. Rain that cannot drain fast enough collects in dips, lanes and low gardens regardless of how far the nearest river is, so a postcode can sit well clear of every flood zone and still carry a flag.
The Environment Agency's climate-adjusted version of the zones, which models how the flood plain could spread under a changing climate, also puts 0% of Felsted's postcodes inside it. On the river side, the forward look matches the present one.
For insurance, a home outside the flood zones with nothing on record should usually find standard cover without trouble. The awkward cases are the few addresses carrying a surface-water or local river flag, where an insurer will price that address on its own map, whatever the village's reputation.
The broader postcode indicators combine several measures, surface water among them, and count a postcode if any one of those flags it. On that basis, about 7% of Felsted's postcodes rate high on at least one, about 2% medium and about 27% low. A postcode only needs one bad measure to land in a band, so the high figure is a small cluster with something to answer for. The useful check is the Environment Agency's long-term flood risk service for the exact address, run for surface water as well as rivers, because that is where any flag will show up.
Counting homes is more useful still. The Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea assessment lists only two of Felsted's postcodes as carrying any risk at all, covering 62 properties. Of those, two properties are at high risk, one of them residential, and two at medium, with none at low or very low. Every other property in the village fails to make the list at all. Sixty-two properties checked, two at high risk: that is the scale of Felsted's river problem, and it is small enough to name street by street.
The question of defences barely arises. The Environment Agency's modelled flood extents put 0% of postcodes in the high-probability extent with a defence in place and 0% without one. In that model, a defence being present would only mean one exists in the modelling, never that the house behind it stays dry, so the more reassuring fact is that the high-risk extent misses the village entirely.
No historic flooding is recorded anywhere in the area. That is reassuring, within limits, because a flood nobody logged leaves no entry, and the record only knows what someone wrote down.
Felsted's flood risk is middling overall. The river side of the picture is close to clear, but the scattered surface-water and high-risk flags mean a handful of addresses here carry a real exposure that the village-wide figures do not show.