Easky takes its name from the Irish iasc, fish, and Iascaigh - abounding in fish - after the Easky River that runs through the village. The parish was originally called Imleach Iseal, low land verging on the water, after the marshy ground around the river mouth. In the old genealogies, the area belonged to the Ui Fiachrach Muaidhe, a branch of one of the great Connachta dynasties. John O'Donovan's nineteenth-century textbook records a fragment of older verse: to Iasca, of the land of the white-blossomed apple-trees, belongs the O'Mailduns of high renown. The O'Muldoons held the mansion seat in Castletown, just west of the village. The name has almost vanished from Easky now. The apple trees too. The verse remains, an echo of a clan and a landscape that have changed almost beyond recognition.

Beside the pier stands O'Dowd Castle, built in 1207. It was originally raised for Oliver McDonnell, who had come to Easky to marry an O'Dowd widow - a Norman-Gaelic alliance of the kind that knitted together the political map of medieval Ireland. The castle later passed to the O'Dowd chieftains of Tireragh, who held it for centuries. Much of the original structure has been lost to weather and time, but the main body still stands, looking out over the harbour where small fishing boats now tie up beside surfers' vans. Eight hundred years of Atlantic gales have worn down the masonry, but the walls have held. A castle that watched the early Norman expansion now watches the second wave of foreign visitors - tourists with surfboards and wetsuits, here for the breaks.

Built in 1847 during the worst years of the Great Famine, Easky Bridge connects the main village to the Sligo side of the river. Its construction was almost certainly funded as relief works - the same scheme that built so many roads, bridges, and harbour walls across western Ireland in those terrible years. The bridge carries a peculiar artefact in its wall: the Bullance stone, a symbolic drinking trough whose presence formally qualified the village to hold a Fair Day. In the nineteenth century, hangings took place at this bridge. The condemned were brought from the Easky Courthouse, built around 1870 just opposite the local vocational school. That courthouse was attacked during the Civil War and finally closed for monthly sessions in 2010. The bridge, the trough, the gallows, the courthouse: an entire arc of the village's legal history written into one short street.

Easkey GAA, the local Gaelic football club, was founded in 1888, just four years after the foundation of the GAA itself. The club played in the first Sligo Senior Football Championship that same year, taking on St John's at Collooney on 11 March 1888. They have won five Sligo Senior titles. But Easkey GAA also became the subject of a poignant segment on RTE's Reeling in the Years series, recalling the 1986 episode when the club lost fifteen players - a full team's worth - in a single year to emigration to Britain and the United States. The story of small Irish rural clubs is often this: enough players for a senior team, then a recession or a Brexit or a bad few years, and suddenly the panel is gone. The roads to London and Boston empty the parishes. The pitches keep the names of the absent.

The mother of playwrights Martin McDonagh and John Michael McDonagh - whose films include In Bruges, The Guard, and Three Billboards - comes from Easky. In 2014 John Michael McDonagh shot his film Calvary in the village and the surrounding coastline. The film stars Brendan Gleeson as a parish priest in a small Irish town confronting violence and loss of faith. The setting was not just a backdrop. The bleak beauty of Easky's coast - the reef breaks, the cliffs, the long horizon, the stone walls running down to the sea - is part of the film's argument. Writers Jack Harte and sculptor Fred Conlon, both born in the Easky townland of Killeenduff, completed the village's surprising contribution to Irish letters and arts. A surf town with two reef breaks and an eight-hundred-year-old castle, it turns out, also produces stories.