When the cartographer William Bald mapped this coastline in 1812, he showed the houses of Inver strung along a river that flowed into Broadhaven Bay. That arrangement has loosened over the two centuries since; people now live in places like Caoldubh as well as the older village core. The townland covers about 671.6 acres, or 2.7 square kilometres, of bog, machair, and shoreline. The 2011 census counted 114 residents. The village belongs to the civil parish of Kilcommon, in the ancient barony of Erris, and looks east across the bay toward the Stags of Broadhaven and Benwee Head. Spanish ships used the bay throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a place of provisional shelter, exchanging goods for information about the next leg of their voyage north. Inver watched them come and go.

Inver Castle stood here once, listed in the Irish state's Record of Monuments and Places. It belonged to the Clan Barrett, a Norman-Irish family whose presence in this corner of Mayo lasted for centuries. The Barretts revolted at some point in the disturbed politics of the seventeenth century, and by 1655 the castle had passed to a family called the Cormucks, who had come up from Munster. They did not hold it long. In 1680 Sir James Shaen acquired it, the same Shaen family who would later try and fail to build the original Belmullet. By the time the Congested Districts Board purchased the townland and the castle ruins around 1920 to redistribute the land among local tenants, the castle was already long past saving. Today only a recorded site remains, the building itself reduced to fragments.

Brian Rua U'Cearbhain was born here in 1648 and became one of the most famous Irish-language prophets of the western seaboard. His prophecies, passed down orally and partially collected by later folklorists, ranged from foretelling the coming of railways to predictions about strange events at the end of times. He is associated specifically with the Mullet and Erris area, and his name still surfaces in conversations about local lore. Some of his foretellings about ships and the sea took on a new resonance during the Spanish Armada legends and again during the Famine emigrations. Like most prophet figures in Irish tradition, the historical Brian Rua is partly visible and partly obscured by the layer of legend that grew up around him. What is certain is that Inver was the place where he was born, and the place he never quite stopped belonging to.

The Catholic church in Inver, dedicated to Saint Patrick, contains a stained glass window described by architectural inventories as 'jewel-like' and attributed to Earley Studios Limited in Dublin. Earley and Company, founded in the nineteenth century, produced stained glass for hundreds of Irish churches, and their work in remote parishes like Inver brought metropolitan craftsmanship to villages where most other public art was modest at best. The church itself, alongside a vocational school built in 1958 and a cemetery opened in 1969, makes up the small civic core of the village. Inver has no major industries, no large facilities, no tourist infrastructure beyond what the broader Wild Atlantic Way provides. It has its place on the bay, its language, and its prophet. That has been enough to sustain a community here for four hundred years and counting.