Yes, and the parts most at risk are the parts nearest the water everyone moves here for. Roughly one postcode in six carries a high flood rating on at least one measure. The river-and-sea zones cover about an eighth of the town. Sixty-four flood events sit on the record. Ottery is not a flood-plain town so much as a town with a floodplain running through the middle of it, and everything depends on which side of that line your front door sits.
The Environment Agency's mapping puts about 12% of the area's postcodes in flood zone 3, the highest-probability band for flooding from rivers and the sea, and about 6% in zone 2. Those two bands are separate rather than nested. Zone 2 is the additional medium-probability fringe lying outside zone 3, not a wider circle containing it, so the smaller number is not an error and should not be read as one.
Surface water does not get its own published share here, because the postcode indicator used further down folds it in with rivers and the sea rather than splitting them out. What the record does carry is history. Sixty-four flood events have been logged in this area, and about 15% of postcodes fall inside areas of historic flooding. The most recent logged event, in October 2008, came from an ordinary watercourse rather than the main river, when the channel could no longer take what was in it and there were no raised defences to slow it down. Drainage-scale water, in other words, not headline-river water. It still ends up in the same hallway.
Looking forward, the climate-adjusted extent covers about 14% of the area's postcodes, against the roughly 12% currently mapped in zone 3. That allowance is the Environment Agency planning for a wetter century rather than a warning about next winter, but it is the version of the map a lender's valuer will increasingly be looking at.
For insurance, this is the kind of place where cover is obtainable and the price of it depends entirely on the address rather than the town. Two houses four hundred metres apart can produce quotes that look like they came from different counties. Get an indicative quote on the specific property before you instruct a solicitor, not after, because the moment to discover the excess on a flood claim is while you still have the option of walking away.
Across the whole town, about 18% of postcodes carry a high rating on at least one flood measure, about 10% a medium rating and about 27% a low one. That indicator combines surface water with rivers and sea, so it overlaps the zone figures above rather than sitting alongside them. Adding the two together produces a number that means nothing.
Counted as homes rather than postcodes, the picture is sharper. The Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping covers 862 properties in the postcodes that carry any risk at all, and only postcodes with some risk appear in that list. Of those, 242 are rated high risk, 97 medium and 70 low. Of the high-risk ones, 141 are residential. Those are real houses with real letterboxes, and somebody lives in every one of them.
On whether anything stands in the way, about 7% of postcodes sit inside a high-probability modelled extent with no defence present in the model, against about 5% where a defence is present. Present in the model is the operative phrase. It confirms a structure exists in the mapping, not that it is adequate, maintained, or built for the flood that turns up.
Every postcode here falls inside a shoreline management plan area, and the stated policy across the twenty, fifty and hundred-year horizons is hold the line. That is an intention to maintain coastal defences over those horizons rather than a promise, and it describes a coast that sits about eight kilometres away. The river is the nearer problem by a wide margin. At the closest tide gauge, Devonport, the record from 1962 to 2015 shows a measured rise of about 2.35 millimetres a year, which is history rather than forecast.
Flooding is the weakest thing about Ottery St Mary, and it is not close. The town is worth buying into and the mapping is worth an hour of your time first, because here the postcode matters more than the town does.