Yes, in places, and this is not a question to leave until the survey comes back. Roughly one postcode in ten sits in the highest river-and-sea flood zone. Close to one in five rates high on at least one flood measure. Somerset has form, and the most recent event on record here was defences being overtopped rather than dodged. The risk is real, it is local, and it changes from one end of a lane to the other.
On the Environment Agency's river-and-sea mapping, about 11% of the area's postcodes fall inside flood zone 3, the highest-probability band, and about 4% sit in flood zone 2. Those two bands are exclusive rather than nested: zone 2 is the additional medium-probability fringe lying beyond zone 3, which is why it is the smaller of the two numbers here. A property in zone 3 is not also counted in zone 2, and anyone reading the two figures as one total will end up with a picture that does not exist.
The zone maps only describe rivers and the sea. They say nothing about water that arrives across a field, down a road, or out of a drain that has given up. Around 9% of postcodes here have a recorded historic flood against them, from 70 recorded events in total. The most recent of those was in February 2014, logged as a main river event caused by overtopping of defences, which is a description Somerset residents will recognise without needing the year read out to them.
Looking forward rather than back, about 7% of postcodes fall within the Environment Agency's climate-adjusted flood zone, which models the extent under allowances for future conditions rather than today's. That is the map a mortgage will still be running against in twenty years.
For insurance, the practical effect is that the address matters far more than the village. Properties inside a mapped zone can face higher premiums, higher excesses on flood cover specifically, and questions at renewal that other buyers never see. The Flood Re scheme exists to make cover obtainable for higher-risk homes, but it does not cover homes built since 2009, which excludes precisely the newer estates that make up so much of the recent building here. Get an indicative quote for the specific address before instructing a solicitor, not after.
Taking every measure together, including surface water alongside rivers and the sea, about 19% of postcodes here rate high on at least one flood indicator, about 17% medium, and about 47% low. Those bands overlap with the flood zone figures rather than sitting alongside them, so they are a second way of looking at the same ground, never a total to be added.
Counted as homes rather than postcodes, the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping identifies 1,772 properties across the 75 postcodes here that carry any risk at all. Of those, 176 properties are at high risk, 62 at medium and 668 at low, with 108 of the high-risk properties being residential. Postcodes with no modelled risk do not appear in that list at all, so this is a count of the exposed end of the village rather than a description of the whole of it.
Whether anything stands between the water and the house is a separate question, and the answer is uneven. About 13% of postcodes sit inside a modelled high-risk extent with no defence present in the model, against about 6% where a defence is present. Present in the model is not the same as safe: the most recent recorded event here was water going over a defence, not around one.
The nearest coastline is roughly 5 kilometres away, and where shoreline management policy applies, the stated position is to hold the line over the twenty, fifty and hundred year horizons. That is an intention to maintain defences, recorded on a plan. It is not a guarantee of funding, and it is not evidence that a defence already stands where a particular house needs one.
At the nearest tide gauge, at Devonport, the record from 1962 to 2015 shows sea level rising at about 2.35 millimetres a year. That is a measured historic rate over that period rather than a projection of what comes next.
Water is the weakest thing about this area and the one item on the list that can genuinely undo a purchase. Two houses a few hundred metres apart can sit on opposite sides of that line, so check the exact address on the Environment Agency's long-term flood risk service before anything else gets decided.