Irish place names repeat themselves up and down the western coastline because the people who named them shared a common stock of words for common features. Inis (island) plus toirc (genitive of torc, wild boar) appears at least twice on the western seaboard - in Connemara and in Mayo. The Mayo Inishturk is large, inhabited, has a school, a pier, and ferries from Roonagh. The Connemara Inishturk is the smaller cousin, designated 'South' to keep ferry passengers and post officials from arriving at the wrong place. The wild boar that gave the islands their names disappeared from Ireland centuries ago - probably hunted out by the late medieval period, certainly extinct in the wild by the 1700s. Wild boar have only recently returned to parts of Ireland through escape and deliberate release. The islands keep the name.

Inishturk South lies in the channel between Turbot Island to the south and Omey Island to the north, just inshore of the open Atlantic. The easiest landing is on the southeast side; the western and northern coasts take the brunt of Atlantic swell and are mostly impassable. A small community lived here into the mid-20th century - probably never more than a handful of families - dependent on lobster pots and a tiny patch of cultivable ground. The story of these small Connemara islands is consistent across all of them: a population that hung on through the 19th century, was cut down by famine in 1845-49, recovered slightly, then collapsed across the early-to-mid 20th century as steady wage labour on the mainland became possible and the children stopped staying. By the second half of the century the island was empty. Roofs fell in. Walls slumped.

At the end of the 20th century, some of the old stone cottages were quietly converted into holiday accommodation - simple structures with no mains electricity and visitor numbers small enough that the place remains essentially undisturbed. The radio-TV mast on the hill is functional infrastructure, providing relay coverage for the small offshore population on neighboring islands and for shipping in the bay. The combination is typical of the Irish western islands today: a slim modern intervention serving the wider grid, sitting on top of a landscape that for human purposes is almost entirely a memory. On a calm summer evening, a small boat approaching the southeast landing can put a visitor ashore on an island where they may not see another person for the duration of their stay - which is precisely what most visitors come for.