Woodstock is out of reach of rivers and the sea, and the rain is the part that needs checking. No homes in the town are in the river flood zones. Roughly one postcode in nine carries a high risk once surface water is counted. About a quarter carry a low one. The risk here comes down from the sky, and the River Glyme is a minor part of it.
The Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones cover 0% of Woodstock's postcodes. That is 0% in Flood Zone 3, the highest-probability band, and 0% in Flood Zone 2, the medium-probability fringe beyond it. The Glyme runs through Wootton, Kiddington, Glympton and Bladon on its way past, and it has stayed off the agency's main map of the town.
Surface water is where the risk lives. With the rivers ruled out, any flood flag on a Woodstock postcode is mostly about heavy rain running off roofs, roads and fields faster than the drains can take it. The agency maps it separately from the river zones, so a house can be outside every river zone and still sit in a low spot on a wet street.
The Environment Agency also models how its flood zones grow under a changing climate, and on that projection 0% of Woodstock's postcodes are added. It is a modelled outlook on river and sea flooding only, and it says nothing about what heavier rain might do to the drains.
For insurance, river-and-sea zones of zero are what insurers like to see, and most of the town should get ordinary cover on ordinary terms. Where a postcode carries a surface-water flag, the insurer will have spotted it, whether or not the seller mentioned it. Put the exact postcode into the Environment Agency's long-term flood risk service, and get a quote on it, while the offer is still only an idea.
The postcode-level picture folds every measure together, surface water included, and counts a postcode if any one of them flags it. On that basis about 11% of Woodstock's postcodes rate high on at least one measure, about 13% medium and about 26% low. These shares overlap with the river zones and with each other, so they describe how widely the flags fall more than how many homes are wet.
Counted in homes, the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping lists only the two postcodes in the area that carry any river or sea risk at all, covering 39 properties. Of those, one is at high risk, none at medium and two at low. One residential property sits in the high band. That is a single house, and someone owns it.
On defences, 0% of postcodes fall inside the modelled high-risk extent with a defence present, and 0% fall inside it without one. Nothing stands between the water and the houses because the model has no water there to stand against. A defence in the model would only mean a wall had been drawn on the map, and Woodstock has not needed one drawn.
Sea level is a distant concern. The nearest tide gauge is at Portsmouth, where sea level rose about 2 millimetres a year over its record from 1962 to 2023. When the gauge that covers your town is on the south coast, the sea has not been on Woodstock's list of problems.
The Environment Agency has no historic flood recorded anywhere in the area, at 0% of postcodes. A blank record is good news, though it only means nobody wrote a flood down, and surface water often goes unrecorded because it is gone by the morning.
Woodstock's flood risk is middling. The rivers and the sea leave it alone, and the rain does not.