Parts of it, and the hill decides which parts. About one postcode in five sits in the highest river and sea flood zone. Around 80 properties carry a high risk from rivers or the sea. Almost a third of postcodes sit within 500 metres of the coast. This is not a village-wide problem, and treating it as one would be as wrong as ignoring it. It is an address problem, and the address is the entire answer.
The Environment Agency's mapping places 19% of the area's postcodes in flood zone 3, the highest-probability band for rivers and the sea, with a further 3% in zone 2. Zone 2 being the smaller figure is not a misprint. The two bands are exclusive, and zone 2 is the additional medium-probability fringe lying beyond zone 3 rather than a wider ring containing it.
Surface water is not published here as a share of its own. It sits folded into the combined postcode indicators further down, which matters because on a lot of streets the water that actually reaches a doorstep comes off a road or a field rather than out of a river. What the historic record holds is three flood events for the area, the most recent in February 1974 and logged against a main river, with around 5% of postcodes falling inside the mapped historic flood extents.
There is also a climate-adjusted layer, covering about 5% of the area's postcodes. That is the forward-looking modelling rather than the present-day picture, and it is the one worth asking about for a property intended to be held for thirty years rather than five.
Insurance follows the address, not the village name. A house on the high ground and a house near the water will get different answers from the same insurer on the same afternoon, and the difference can be large enough to change what the property is worth to you. Get an indicative quote before instructing a solicitor, not after. Listing photographs are taken in July.
On the combined postcode indicators, which fold surface water in alongside rivers and the sea, 19% of postcodes rate high on at least one measure, 39% rate medium and 23% rate low. Those bands overlap with the flood-zone figures above rather than adding to them, because a single postcode can appear in both counts for the same body of water.
Counted as homes rather than postcodes, the Environment Agency's rivers and sea mapping lists 633 properties across the postcodes that carry any risk at all, and postcodes with no risk do not appear in that total. Of those 633, some 80 sit at high risk, 312 at medium, 4 at low and 2 at very low. Fifty of the high-risk properties are residential. That is the figure that translates into actual front doors, and it is a good deal easier to picture than a percentage of postcodes.
Whether anything stands between the water and the building varies. Around 5% of postcodes sit inside a high-risk extent where a defence is present in the model, and 3% inside a high-risk extent where none is. Present in the model means present, not adequate, not maintained and not a guarantee. A defence changes the odds; it does not remove the water.
The coast is close throughout. Around 30% of postcodes lie within 500 metres of it, which is a threshold the mapping defines rather than a statement about any particular house. The nearest postcode reaches within 148 metres of the shoreline, while the median across the area sits at roughly 950 metres inland.
Every postcode here falls under a shoreline management plan, and the stated policy for the next twenty years is no active intervention, shifting to managed realignment over the fifty and hundred year horizons. Read that plainly. No active intervention means the coast is left to do what it does, and managed realignment means the line is expected to move rather than be held. A policy is a stated intention about future maintenance, not a wall that exists today.
For long-run context, the nearest tide gauge at Devonport recorded a rise of about 2.4 millimetres a year across its 1962 to 2015 record. That is a measured historic rate at one gauge rather than a projection for this stretch of coast.
Flooding is the weakest part of the case for Tywardreath, and unusually for a weak point it is one a buyer can resolve before committing rather than discover afterwards. Put the exact address into the Environment Agency's long-term flood risk tool, and let the postcode rather than the village decide the answer.