For half a century, between 1640 and 1690, Inverkip was a place where people were burned for witchcraft. The two parish ministers of the period — the Reverend John Hamilton and the Reverend Alexander Leslie — were described in contemporary records as zealous persecutors of witches. A Royal Enquiry into the Inverkip hunts, which have since been compared in scale to the Salem trials in Massachusetts, was led by Archibald Stewart of Blackhall. During that enquiry, an eighteen-year-old woman named Marie Lamont was brought before the commission. Marie confessed under questioning that she and several other women — Jean King, Kattie Scott, Janet Holm, and others — had met in the dark at the bucht-gait of Ardgowan, where the devil had appeared in the shape of a black man with cloven feet. She was found guilty. She was burned at the stake. The fates of the other women she named are not recorded. A local rhyme from the period preserves the memory of Auld Dunrod, last of the Lindsays of Dunrod Castle, said to have died in mysterious circumstances in a barn belonging to one of his former tenants.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Inverkip was notorious for smuggling. Vessels sailing up the Firth of Clyde to the legitimate ports at Greenock and Port Glasgow could be intercepted offshore, their cargoes of alcohol, tea, and tobacco quietly transferred to local boats and run ashore. Thomas Finnie, the village milkman, became one of the more famous cases on record in the Innerkip Society's archives. The smuggling era ended; the troubles did not. 1849 was disastrous: the crops failed and an outbreak of cholera killed one third of the population. The dead lie in the old graveyard at Millhouse Road, near the derelict mausoleum of the Shaw-Stewart baronets, who built it on the foundations of the original 1188 church and incorporated some of its stones into the structure.

By the 13th century, a castle had been built where Ardgowan House now stands. The location is genuinely venerable: Robert the Bruce fought here for both sides during the Wars of Independence, depending on the year and which faction was winning at the time. The Stewarts acquired the land in 1390 and built the existing castle during the 15th century — a three-storey square keep with a garret, hidden inside the gardens of Ardgowan House and not on public view. The keep was abandoned as a residence when the Shaw-Stewarts built Ardgowan House proper in 1799-1801. The first proper road from Inverkip to Greenock was constructed by Sir John Shaw Stewart in 1803, replacing the trackless five-mile walk that had taken the Greenock congregation to church on Sundays. Ardgowan House served as a military hospital in both World Wars and was the first Scottish military hospital to be damaged by German bombs — slight damage, no casualties, but a great deal of broken glass.

The Shaws Water scheme, commissioned by Sir Michael Shaw Stewart and designed by the Rothesay industrialist Robert Thom, was completed in 1827. It dammed Shaws Water in the hills behind Inverkip to create Loch Thom, then channelled the water along an aqueduct called the Greenock Cut around the contours to supply the town with both drinking water and industrial power. The scheme stayed in use until 1971. A century and a half later, Inverkip got a less successful piece of infrastructure: the oil-fired Inverkip power station, built in the 1970s just as the 1973 oil crisis made oil-fired generation uneconomical. It was kept in reserve, used briefly during the 1984-85 miners' strike, mothballed in the late 1990s, decommissioned in 2006, and finally demolished between 2010 and 2015. The 774-foot chimney was, while it stood, the tallest freestanding structure in Scotland and the third tallest in the UK.

Today Inverkip is best known for Kip Marina, which opened in 1971 as the first marina in Scotland and one of only three in the United Kingdom at the time. It sits at the mouth of the Kip Water, on a basin that the Royal Engineers excavated during the Second World War for barge storage. Over six hundred berths line the pontoons now, alongside chandleries and repair yards and a bar called the Chartroom. Scotland's Boat Show comes here every October. The village itself has grown rapidly since the 1980s housing boom — from around two hundred people at its origins to about thirty-five hundred today — and now functions largely as a dormitory for Greenock and Glasgow beyond. The original 1836 schoolhouse is still in daily use, three extensions later. The Inverkip Hotel, a coaching inn dating back more than three hundred years, still pours pints on Main Street. A pod of orcas was reportedly spotted in the firth off Lunderston Bay in early 2018.