Not from rivers or the sea; rain is the part to check. None of the village sits in the river-and-sea flood zones. No past flooding is on record. Roughly one postcode in eleven still carries a high-risk flag. Ticehurst's flood question is about where the water runs off, and the river maps won't answer it.
On the Environment Agency's river-and-sea mapping, 0% of Ticehurst's postcodes fall in flood zone 3, the highest-probability band, and 0% in flood zone 2, the medium-probability fringe beyond it. The village sits in the upper reaches of the Bewl stream and the River Rother, where the water is still starting out rather than arriving in bulk, and the mapping agrees.
Surface water is a different measure and tells a different story. It comes from heavy rain that can't drain away fast enough, and it ignores flood zones entirely. A house can sit well above any river and still have a lane that turns into a stream in a cloudburst, a driveway sloping the wrong way, or a garden at the bottom of someone else's field. That risk is set street by street, which is why it has to be checked address by address.
Looking ahead, the Environment Agency's climate-adjusted flood zones also cover 0% of the area's postcodes. On current modelling, the rivers are not expected to reach Ticehurst in the future either.
For insurance, that makes Ticehurst a village where most homes should be straightforward to cover. The postcodes with a flag are the exception, and insurers price on the individual property. A quote obtained after exchange is worth less than one obtained before the offer.
At postcode level, the measures fold surface water in alongside rivers and sea. Of Ticehurst's postcodes, about 9% rate high on at least one measure, about 9% medium on at least one, and about 24% low on at least one. These bands overlap one another and measure something different from the flood zones, so they are not added together or read as zone figures. Put plainly, most postcodes carry no flag, and the ones that do owe it to rain, not rivers.
The defences question barely arises. In the modelled flood extents, 0% of postcodes sit in a high-probability area without defences and 0% in one with defences. Nothing in the model stands between a river and these houses because the model puts no river near them. Where defences do appear in modelling elsewhere, "defended" only means a defence is present in the model, never that a property is safe.
Sea level is somebody else's problem here. The nearest tide gauge, at Dover, recorded sea level rising at about 2 millimetres a year across its 1961 to 2010 record. That is a measured historic rate, not a forecast, and for an inland village at the head of its rivers it is background reading.
The area has no recorded historic flooding, with 0% covered by past flood outlines. That is reassuring, but it only covers what was mapped. A cellar that took water in a storm decades ago would not necessarily appear, and the seller is the person who knows.
Ticehurst's flood risk sits in the middle: no river or sea threat on any map, with a surface-water minority that decides the answer for a handful of addresses. Check the lane, the slope and the specific postcode, and most buyers will find the risk small.