Yorkley and Whitecroft has some flood risk, and very little of it comes from a river. No postcode falls in the highest river flood zone. A few fall in the band below it. About one postcode in twelve rates high on at least one measure once rainwater is counted. In a hill village, the water to watch is the water coming down the road.
The Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones put about 2% of the area's postcodes in Flood Zone 2 and none in Flood Zone 3. The two zones are separate bands. Zone 3 is the highest-probability land, and Zone 2 is the medium-probability strip beyond it, so a small Zone 2 share alongside an empty Zone 3 is consistent. The Agency's records hold a single flood here, in July 1968, when a main river ran out of channel with no raised defences to stop it.
Surface water is the other kind of flooding, and it has no separate share of its own in this answer. The site counts it inside the postcode-level measure further down, so it is never added on top of the river zones.
The Agency's climate-adjusted mapping widens the river-and-sea zone to about 3% of postcodes. That is the share the Agency's own allowances expect to be in reach as the climate warms, and for these villages the change is small.
For insurance, the river picture works in a buyer's favour, with very little of the area inside the mapped zones. Surface water does not show up on a river map, and insurers price it street by street. The one check worth making is a quote for the exact address you are buying, so you see the insurer's view of that house.
Taking every measure together, surface water included, about 8% of the area's postcodes rate high on at least one of them, 5% medium and 19% low. A postcode only needs one measure to qualify, which is why these shares are larger than the river zones. They count different things, and both are correct.
The count of homes is the more useful number. Across the seven postcodes that show any river-or-sea risk, the Environment Agency rates 7 properties high, 12 medium and 15 low, out of 149 properties in those postcodes. Postcodes with no risk at all are left out of the count entirely. Only two of the properties rated high are homes.
On defences, the Agency's high-risk flood extent covers none of the area's postcodes, defended or undefended, and its low-risk extent covers about 2% without defences. So the question of what stands between the river and the house barely comes up here. Where a defence does appear in the Agency's model, it means only that a defence is there, not that the house behind it is safe.
The coast is a few miles off, and the shoreline management plan for that stretch is no active intervention at all three horizons, 20, 50 and 100 years. That is a stated intention for the coast, and like any shoreline plan it depends on funding nobody has committed. It says nothing about what defences are in place today, and for an inland village up in the forest it matters very little.
The nearest tide gauge on record is Liverpool Georges and Princes Piers, where the sea rose by about 1.4 millimetres a year between 1858 and 1983. That is the closest thing to a sea-level record these villages have, and it was taken at a gauge on the far side of Wales that stopped recording in 1983.
Yorkley and Whitecroft's flood risk is middling, not alarming. The rivers leave most of it alone, and the risk that remains comes from rainwater, which varies house by house.