Milton-under-Wychwood and Shipton-under-Wychwood has a bigger flood problem than its river maps suggest. Hardly any postcodes are in the river flood zones. More than a quarter score high on at least one flood measure once rainwater is counted. A main river has burst its banks here before. The rain is what does the damage here, more than the river.
In the Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones, about 1% of the area's postcodes are in zone 3, the highest-probability band, and another 2% are in zone 2, the medium-probability band just outside it. The two bands don't overlap, so zone 2 is the extra margin beyond zone 3. By that measure the villages barely register.
Surface water is where the risk is. When heavy rain falls faster than the ground and the drains can take it, water collects on roads and in low spots and gardens, whether or not a river is nearby. The Environment Agency maps that separately, and here it shows up far more often than the river zones do.
When the Environment Agency's mapping allows for a changing climate, the share of postcodes in a flood zone rises to about 3%. That is still a small number, and the modelling says it is heading up.
Insurers price individual houses, not villages, and they use their own surface-water models alongside the river zones. A house on a low corner can cost noticeably more to insure than one a short walk uphill. The useful check here is to get an indicative quote for the exact address while the survey is still being booked. That is the point where you find out whether insurers see the house as an ordinary risk or one they want paying extra for.
Take every flood measure together, rivers, sea and surface water, and about 27% of postcodes rate high on at least one of them, about 16% medium and about 44% low. A postcode counts if any single measure flags it, which explains why this picture looks so much busier than the zone figures.
The Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping goes down to individual properties. Only postcodes with some risk appear in it, 12 here, covering 238 properties. Of those, 14 properties are at high risk, 9 at medium, 43 at low and 3 at very low. Eleven of the high-risk properties are homes. That is a small number of houses, and if you're buying one of them, the numbers for the rest of the village don't help you.
Defences barely feature. About 1% of postcodes sit in the high-risk extent without a modelled defence, and about 1% sit in it with one. "Defended" only means the model includes a defence; it says nothing about whether that defence keeps the water out of the kitchen. The Environment Agency's own record of the July 2007 flood notes that a main river overflowed its channel with no raised defences in the way, the more recent of the two flood events it has logged here.
The nearest tide gauge to the villages is at Portsmouth, where sea level rose by about 2 millimetres a year between 1962 and 2023. For two inland Cotswold villages the sea is the least of their worries.
Flood risk is a weak point here, and nearly all of it comes from the rain rather than the river.