Sway is at low but not zero risk of flooding. Almost none of it sits in a river or coastal flood zone. A modest scatter of postcodes carry a surface-water risk. Nothing here has a recorded history of flooding. The honest headline is a village that stays mostly dry and keeps a few damp corners.
Start with rivers and the sea, which is where the formal flood zones live. None of Sway falls into the middling river flood zone, and under two percent of it sits in the highest zone, the band reserved for land with the greatest chance of river or tidal flooding. For an inland forest village threaded with small watercourses, that is about as light as river risk gets. The Avon Water gave the place its name and its noise, and takes almost none of its houses.
Surface water is the more realistic worry, the flooding that comes when rain sheets off saturated ground faster than the drains can swallow it. Here it touches a minority of the village. Roughly seven in a hundred postcodes carry a high surface-water risk, around one in twenty a medium one, and about one in nine a lower one. That leaves the large majority of Sway with little to fear from a heavy downpour, while a handful of pockets will want their gutters clear and their airbricks respected.
Look forward and the picture barely shifts. Once a climate allowance is folded into the modelling, the share of Sway in the highest flood zone stays under two percent, the same slim figure as today. Whatever the coming decades do to the weather, they are not projected to turn this village into a flood map.
For insurance, that combination reads well. A property clear of the flood zones and clear of surface-water risk should find standard cover without a flood-related fuss, and without the loadings that follow a home into a known wet spot. The caveat is the postcode-level one. A house in one of the higher-risk pockets can carry a very different quote from a neighbour two streets over, so the exact address matters far more than the village average. Check the specific property, not the reputation of the place.
The blunt verdict is that flood risk in Sway is real but small, and heavily a question of where precisely you buy. Most of the village is dry ground with a clean record, and the risk that does exist is the sort you manage rather than the sort you flee.