Parts of it flood, and the parts that do are not a mystery. This is a valley with a river running through it and the mapping reflects that. A tenth of postcodes carry a high rating on at least one flood measure. Only a sliver sits in the most serious river and sea zone. The village as a whole is not a flood plain, but the address you choose does almost all of the work here, and the postcode does almost none of it.
On the Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones, about 4% of the area's postcodes fall in zone 2 and about 1% in zone 3. Those bands sit side by side rather than inside each other. Zone 3 is the higher-probability core and zone 2 is the medium-probability fringe beyond it, so the smaller figure is the more serious one. Roughly nineteen postcodes in twenty are outside both.
Rivers are not the only way water arrives. About 4% of postcodes sit inside recorded historic flood outlines, and 14 separate flood events are logged on the recorded events register for the area, the most recent in December 2012, when an ordinary watercourse exceeded its channel capacity with no raised defences in the way. In country like this the thing that fills your utility room is rarely the famous river. It is a ditch nobody has cleared since the last time.
Looking forward, about 6% of postcodes fall inside the flood zone once the climate change allowance is applied, up from the current zone footprint. That is the boundary shifting outward across a handful of streets rather than the valley drowning.
For insurance, the practical consequence is that this is an area where the address determines the quote and the quote can determine whether the purchase works. A property inside a mapped extent can attract a higher excess, a specialist policy, or questions about previous claims that the seller has to answer. Get an indicative quote for the specific address before instructing a solicitor, not after the survey.
Pulling every indicator together, including surface water alongside rivers and sea, about 11% of postcodes rate high on at least one measure, about 5% medium and about 18% low. Those bands overlap the flood-zone shares rather than adding to them, because a postcode can appear in both. The higher number is not a contradiction of the lower one, it is a wider net.
Counted as homes rather than postcodes, the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping covers 850 properties across the 34 postcodes that carry any risk at all, and only those postcodes appear in it. Of those properties, 51 sit at high risk, 22 at medium and 54 at low, with 22 of the high-risk ones residential. Fifty-one houses is a small number for an area this size and a very large number if yours is one of them.
On defences, about 2% of postcodes sit within a high-probability extent where the model shows no defence present, and about another 2% within one where a defence is present in the model, with a further 4% in a low-probability undefended extent. Present in the model means a structure exists in the dataset. It does not mean the water has been beaten, and it is not something to buy on.
The sea is mostly a distant concern. About 1% of postcodes lie within 500 metres of the coast, the closest point of the area comes to within roughly 360 metres of it, and the typical postcode sits about 7 kilometres inland. Around 58% of postcodes fall inside a shoreline management plan area, where the stated policy over the 20, 50 and 100 year horizons is to hold the line. A policy is an intention to maintain defences, not a promise and not a defence that already exists. At the nearest tide gauge, at Devonport, the measured record from 1962 to 2015 shows sea level rising at about 2.35 millimetres a year, which is a historic rate rather than a forecast.
Flood risk here lands somewhere in the middle, which is the honest answer nobody wants. Most of the area is dry, a small and clearly mapped part of it is not, and the difference between a fine purchase and an expensive one is entirely a matter of which house you pick.