Mostly no, and the exception is not the sea. None of the village sits in the Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones. About one in ten postcodes still flags high on at least one flood measure. Every postcode in the village is within a few minutes' walk of salt water. A place bounded on three sides by water that does not appear in the river-and-sea zones is doing something right, and what it is doing is being extremely steep.
Start with rivers and the sea, because that is the measure most searches land on. Around 0% of postcodes here fall in Environment Agency flood zone 3, the higher-probability band, and around 0% fall in zone 2, the medium-probability fringe that sits outside zone 3 rather than containing it. Both bands are empty. For a village wrapped around the mouth of the River Fowey, that is a genuinely good result, and it is geography rather than engineering: water runs off Polruan faster than it can gather.
Surface water is the mechanism that actually matters here, and it does not show up in those zone figures at all. It appears instead in the broader postcode indicators, which fold surface water in alongside rivers and the sea. Rain arriving on a hill this steep has one direction to go, and the streets are the drainage.
Looking forward, about 3% of postcodes fall inside the Environment Agency's climate-change allowance zone, which models a higher-water future rather than today's mapping. Small, but not nothing, and it is the figure that will move first if anything moves.
For insurance, this is a comfortable but not automatic picture. Most of the village should be underwritten on ordinary terms, and the handful of properties nearest the water may be asked to produce a flood history or a surveyor's view before a premium is set. Anyone buying at the low end of the village should get an indicative quote before instructing a solicitor rather than after exchange.
On the combined postcode picture, which counts a postcode if it rates on at least one measure including surface water, about 11% rate high, about 11% rate medium and around 22% rate low. Those bands overlap with the zone figures above rather than adding to them, and they describe postcodes, not individual homes.
In terms of actual homes, the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea property mapping covers 112 properties across the three postcodes that carry any risk at all, and the rest of the village does not appear because it carries none. Of those, six sit at high risk, none at medium and five at low, with three of the high-risk properties residential. Six homes is a small number and a specific one, which is the useful way to hold this: the risk is real for a named handful of addresses at the bottom of the hill and absent for everyone above them.
On defences, the modelled extents show around 0% of postcodes in a high-risk extent with a defence present and around 0% in a high-risk extent without one. Nothing sits in a high-risk modelled extent either way, so the defended-or-not question does not arise here. Where it does arise elsewhere, a defence being present in a model is not the same as a property being safe.
The coast is close by any measure. Every postcode in the village sits within 500 metres of the shoreline, which is the threshold the data uses rather than a claim about any particular house, and the nearest postcode centre sits about 15 metres from the water with a village median of roughly 113 metres. You are not going to forget where you live.
Shoreline management policy for this frontage is to hold the line over the 20, 50 and 100 year horizons. That is a stated intention to maintain defences, not a guarantee and not a defence that already exists. The nearest tide gauge at Devonport recorded sea level rising about 2.35 millimetres a year over its 1962 to 2015 record, which is a measured historic rate rather than a forecast.
No historic flooding is recorded in the area at all. That is meaningfully reassuring, and it is a record of what was reported rather than proof that nothing ever happened.
Flood risk here lands in the middle: clean on the headline measures, with a real and narrow exposure at the waterline that a buyer at the bottom of the hill needs to price properly. The address matters far more than the village does.