Marston Moretaine's flood risk comes from rain with nowhere to go. The river-and-sea flood zones barely touch the village. More than a quarter of its postcodes still rate high on at least one flood measure. No flooding is on record. The water to watch here is the stuff that falls out of the sky.
On the Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones, about 1% of Marston Moretaine's postcodes fall in zone 2 and none fall in zone 3. The two zones are separate bands: zone 3 is the highest-probability land, and zone 2 is the medium-probability fringe beyond it. By that measure the village is almost entirely clear of rivers and the sea.
Surface water is a different matter. The broader postcode indicators below fold it in, and they come out far higher than the river zones, which tells a buyer that most of the risk here is rain pooling and running off. About 53% of postcodes fall inside the Bedfordshire and River Ivel Internal Drainage Board's district, an organisation that only exists where somebody has to keep the ditches working.
Looking ahead, the Environment Agency's climate-adjusted flood zone covers none of the area's postcodes. That is a forward look at rivers and the sea only, so it leaves the surface-water question exactly where it was.
For insurance, the river-zone picture helps most homes, and a property that rates high on surface water can still mean a higher premium or extra questions from the insurer. Put the exact address into the Environment Agency's long-term flood risk service and read the surface-water result, since that is the line most likely to differ from one house to the next.
Counting every measure together, including surface water as well as rivers and the sea, about 28% of Marston Moretaine's postcodes rate high on at least one of them, 37% medium and 71% low. A postcode only needs one measure to qualify, so these shares overlap and describe the worst result each postcode gets on any single one.
The Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping also counts properties, but only in postcodes carrying some risk, and 16 postcodes made that list, holding 403 properties. Of those, 56 are rated high risk, 47 of them homes, with 21 at medium and 32 at low. A count of buildings is the more useful figure for a buyer, because it is a house, and not a postcode, that gets wet.
On the question of defences, about 2% of postcodes are inside the high-risk extent with no defences modelled, and about 2% are inside it once defences are included. The modelled defences make no difference to the high-risk extent at all. "Defended" in this mapping only means a defence appears in the model, which is a long way from saying the house behind it stays dry.
The nearest tide gauge in the national records is at Portsmouth, where the sea rose by about 2 millimetres a year between 1962 and 2023. The nearest place anyone bothers to measure the sea is Portsmouth, which is the best evidence there is that the sea is not Marston Moretaine's problem.
No historic flooding is recorded anywhere in the area. That is reassuring, though a record that holds nothing only covers the floods somebody wrote down.
Flood risk is a weak spot for Marston Moretaine, less because the rivers threaten it than because so much of the village rates high for the water already on the ground. Most homes will be fine, and the ones that are not will show it on the surface-water map.