When the Norman scribes wrote down what they found in 1086, they recorded Preesall as Pressouede, part of the Hundred of Amounderness. That single line in the Domesday Book hides a much longer story. The eastern shore of the Wyre had been settled during the Danish invasions of the 9th and 10th centuries, and the place names still carry the accent. In 1189 the manor was granted to a bowman in the service of Prince John, the youngest son of Henry II, who would later become the king the barons forced to sign Magna Carta. That bowman's descendants, the Elletson family, still own Parrox Hall on the southern edge of the village. They have held the site continuously since 1690, a thread of one family running unbroken through more than three centuries of English history.

Hidden in the mud near the estuary is a site marked on archaeological maps as PRN15022. It is the remains of the Hackensall Tide Mill, known from documents that may date from before 1260 and noted on the Ordnance Survey of 1848. Tide mills are rare nationally. They worked by trapping seawater on the rising tide and releasing it through a wheel as the bay drew back, and very few medieval examples have ever been excavated in Britain. This one may be the only known tide mill in Lancashire. Parrox Hall itself is a Grade II* listed country house, probably early 17th century, built of rendered brick on an H-shaped plan. The site traces back to Geoffrey the Crossbowman, known to the scribes as Galfridus Arbalastarius, the Norman soldier granted six carucates of land by Prince John in 1189. A trust now safeguards the hall's future, opening it to the public on a handful of summer days each year.

West of the village lie a chain of pools the locals call the Flashes. They are not natural. From the 1920s into the early 1930s the ground above old salt workings began to give way, slumping in on itself as the brine pumping below removed the rock that held the surface up. By 1931 the mines had closed, defeated by their own subsidence. ICI kept pumping brine from nearby land until the 1980s, but the village above had to make peace with a landscape that was suddenly half water. The Flashes are now a quiet feature of the Over Wyre flats, fishing grounds and birding spots where once there had been pasture. The sea wall that protects the village runs from Knott End-on-Sea to Pilling, and at one point near the pumping station, walkers cross a filled-in stone pillbox from the Second World War, camouflaged so well into the rocks that most people pass it without noticing.

On 30 July 1908 the long-awaited Garstang and Knott-End Railway pushed its last section into Knott End, bringing Preesall station with it. The line existed mainly so farmers in Over Wyre could move produce up and down the country. It was never a comfortable fit with the modern world, and the passenger service quit on 29 March 1930, two decades and change after it began. Buses to Lancaster and Blackpool took over. Preesall today has a population of around 5,700 according to the 2011 census, three schools including Carter's Charity Voluntary Controlled Primary, founded by yeoman James Carter in 1710 for the children of the parish, and one pub still standing: the Black Bull. The Saracens Head, where generations once drank, is now a bed and breakfast — the kind of quiet retirement most village inns would happily settle for.