No, not from rivers and not from the sea. Not one postcode here sits in a flood zone. Nothing is recorded as having flooded. What risk exists arrives as rainfall on the ground rather than water rising up to meet you. The flood question in Wembury is really a coastline question, and that one is slower and more interesting.
The Environment Agency maps river and sea flooding in two exclusive bands: zone 3, the higher-probability core, and zone 2, the additional medium-probability fringe that sits beyond it. Across the 66 postcodes covered here, the share in zone 3 is 0% and the share in zone 2 is 0%. That is the whole of the river-and-sea answer. There is no estuary channel running through the village and no tidal reach inland, so the mapping has nothing to shade.
With the river-and-sea zones empty, any flooding that shows up on the broader indicators is surface water: rain arriving faster than the ground and the drainage can move it. That is a highly local phenomenon, driven by where a property sits relative to the slope and where the road gullies discharge, and it does not respect the tidy boundaries that river mapping does. Two houses on the same lane can differ.
The climate-adjusted zone share, which extends the river-and-sea mapping to allow for future sea level and rainfall, also comes out at 0%. The forward look does not move Wembury into a zone it is not already in.
For insurance, that combination is close to the best starting position available. No zone 2, no zone 3, no recorded history. Cover should be routinely available at ordinary rates for most addresses, and there should be no Flood Re conversation. That scheme is worth understanding anyway, because it does not cover homes built after 1 January 2009, so a newer property with a flood problem has no backstop to fall into. The exception here is the individual property with a surface-water issue an insurer already knows about, which is why an indicative quote on the exact address is worth getting before instructing a solicitor rather than after.
On the postcode indicators, which fold surface water in alongside rivers and sea and flag a postcode if it rates on at least one measure, about 6% of Wembury's postcodes come out high, roughly 5% medium and around 30% low. Those bands overlap with the zone shares above rather than adding to them: a postcode can register on the surface-water indicator while sitting outside every river-and-sea zone, and here they all do.
Counted as homes rather than postcodes, the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping lists nine properties across a single postcode, and only postcodes carrying some risk appear in it at all. One of those nine is rated high. None of the high-rated ones is residential. Nine properties in a village of this size is a rounding error with an address attached.
None of the 66 postcodes falls inside a modelled high-risk flood extent, defended or undefended. The distinction matters elsewhere and is worth understanding: "defended" in that dataset means a defence exists in the model, not that a property behind it is safe, since defences are built to a standard and water occasionally exceeds it. Here the question does not arise, because there is no modelled high-risk extent to stand behind.
The coast is closer than the flood mapping suggests. About 5% of postcodes sit within 500 metres of the shoreline, a threshold the data defines rather than a judgement about any one house, with the nearest postcode around 363 metres from the water and the median around 909 metres. Every postcode in the area falls under a shoreline management plan.
That plan's policy for this stretch, across the 20, 50 and 100 year horizons alike, is no active intervention. Nothing is planned to hold this coastline where it currently is. A shoreline policy is a stated intention rather than a guarantee, and no active intervention is not a defence that might fail, it is the absence of one by design. The cliffs and the beach will do what the sea tells them to.
At the nearest tide gauge, Devonport, the measured trend over the 1962 to 2015 record runs at about 2.35 millimetres a year. That is a historic rate from an instrument, not a projection.
No historic flooding is recorded in the area. That is genuinely reassuring, and it is worth saying what it is not: an absence in the record is not proof that nothing has ever happened, only that nothing has been logged.
Flood risk here lands middling rather than low, and the reason is not the rain. Inland Wembury is about as clean as flood mapping gets in coastal Devon. The asterisk is a shoreline that nobody intends to hold, and the closer to it you buy, the more that asterisk is yours.