Most of the island faces west and gets the weather full in the face: the highest point reaches 189 metres, and the cliffs along the western shore drop almost straight into deep water. The two surviving villages, Ballyheer and Garranty, are tucked on the more sheltered eastern end, where the harbour faces the mainland and the wind has time to soften. Two other settlements, Bellavaun and Craggy, were abandoned in earlier waves of depopulation - their roofless cottages still visible in the grass. Caher Island lies just to the south; Clare Island rises larger to the southeast; the Atlantic opens out to the west, empty all the way to Newfoundland.

Archaeological evidence puts people on Inishturk as far back as 4,000 BCE, though the population has waxed and waned with weather, war, and economics. Some of the island's current families descend from evacuees who came in from Inishark, the still-smaller island to the southwest, when that community gave up. A Martello tower on the western coast dates from the Napoleonic Wars, when British coastal defences worried about a French landing on this exposed flank of Ireland. The fort never saw action. It still stands.

The Inishturk Community Centre opened in 1993 and does the work of three buildings - library, meeting space, pub. The island's electricity has come from a diesel power station since the 1980s, upgraded in 2014 to three modern generators that keep the freezers running and the school lights on. Until 1997 there was no scheduled ferry; islanders crossed in fishing boats when the weather allowed. Now a regular service runs from Roonagh Quay near Louisburgh, and the pier built in the 1980s gives the island a connection to the mainland that previous generations would have found extravagant. The roads were paved around the same time.

In the spring of 2016, an Irish tourism push gained an unexpected second life on the international internet. Websites picked up a half-joking pitch that Inishturk would welcome any Americans who wanted to flee a Trump presidency, and within weeks the island was being written about in The Atlantic, the Huffington Post, and outlets the islanders had never heard of. The pitch turned out to be one of the small absurdities that helped define the 2016 election cycle. Inishturk got some visitors, some new website traffic, and a brief stretch of fame that the community absorbed with the kind of equanimity you develop when your nearest neighbour is fifteen kilometres of cold water away.

There are no cars to speak of, no traffic, and on a clear day you can walk the perimeter of Inishturk in a few hours. The light off the cliffs at the western end has the hard, scrubbed quality you only get this far out into the Atlantic. Caher Island sits low on the southern horizon; Clare Island rises beyond it like a green back. In winter the boat from Roonagh is often cancelled; in summer the island fills up briefly with hikers, kayakers, and people drawn by exactly the remoteness that, until recently, kept Inishturk on the edge of viability.