Not from rivers or the sea, which is roughly what you would hope for from a village perched on a cliff. Nothing here sits in a river or sea flood zone. Nothing here has a recorded flood extent. What risk does exist arrives from above, on the way down a hill, in a Cornish downpour. The water question in Tintagel is rainfall, not tide.
Start with the mapped zones. None of Tintagel's postcodes fall inside the Environment Agency's flood zone 3, and none fall inside zone 2 either. Those two are exclusive bands rather than nested ones: zone 3 is the higher-probability core and zone 2 is the additional fringe sitting outside it, so a place can legitimately have more of one than the other. Here it has none of either. That is about as clean as a river-and-sea reading gets, and it is entirely down to geography. Water runs off this parish into the Atlantic rather than pooling in it.
Surface water is the other half of the question and it does not read as tidily. About 11% of the village's postcodes carry a high rating on at least one flood indicator, and with the river and sea zones empty, what that indicator is picking up is rain moving across ground rather than a channel overtopping. Steep land sheds water fast. It also concentrates it, and where it concentrates is not always where the map suggests.
The forward look is unchanged. The climate-adjusted flood zone, which extends the modelling to allow for future sea level and rainfall, covers none of Tintagel's postcodes either. Whatever the Atlantic does over the next few decades, the mapped river-and-sea position for this village does not move.
For insurance, a clean flood zone position is a genuinely useful thing to hold. It removes the conversation most coastal buyers have to have with an underwriter about tidal and fluvial cover. Surface water is treated differently and is assessed at the individual address rather than the village, so the sensible order of operations is to get an indicative quote for the specific property before instructing anyone.
Across every measure combined, including surface water alongside rivers and sea, around 11% of postcodes rate high on at least one indicator, roughly 14% rate medium and about 36% rate low. Those bands overlap with the zone figures rather than adding to them: the same postcode can appear in the flood-zone reading and the indicator reading, and here it is the indicator reading doing all of the work.
On the defended question, which normally decides whether anything stands between the water and the house, Tintagel does not present the problem. No postcodes sit inside a modelled high-risk extent at all, defended or undefended. That is not a statement about the quality of any defence, because there is no modelled high-risk extent here for a defence to be doing anything about.
The coast is close, which is the entire point of the place. About 27% of postcodes sit within 500 metres of the shoreline, a threshold the mapping defines rather than a claim about any particular address. The closest point of the village is roughly 220 metres from the water, and the median distance across all postcodes is around 720 metres.
Every postcode in the parish is covered by a shoreline management plan, and the stated policy over the 20, 50 and 100 year horizons is the same in all three: no active intervention. That means no commitment to build or maintain defences along this stretch. The cliffs are expected to do what cliffs do, and the plan is to let them. A policy is a stated intention rather than a guarantee, and no active intervention is the honest label for a coastline nobody is planning to hold.
The nearest long-running tide gauge is at Devonport, where 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, not a forecast, and it is the kind of number that matters more to the cliff than to the house.
No historic flooding is recorded anywhere in the area. That is worth having, and it is worth not overreading. An absence of recorded events is reassuring evidence rather than proof that nothing has ever happened here.
Flood risk in Tintagel lands somewhere in the middle, and the reason is that the two halves of the question give opposite answers. Rivers and sea are a non-issue. Rain on a slope is a real one, and it is address-specific enough that the village-level answer will not settle it for the house you are actually buying.