The town sits at sea level on the peninsula leading out to Mizen Head, with the 407-metre bulk of Mount Gabriel rising directly behind it. The radar domes on the mountain's summit have been visible from every Schull street and harbour for decades - civilian air-traffic radars, not military installations, though they look the part. The harbour is sheltered and deep enough for recreational boating, hosting the annual Fastnet International Schools Regatta and the older Schull Regatta, which has run on and off since 1884 and was revamped in 2014. The town had a population of 669 at the 2022 census. A ferry runs from Schull to Cape Clear Island, the Gaeltacht outpost eight kilometres offshore. Bus Eireann's route 237 connects to Cork City, though only some services reach the town itself. Schull once had its own railway station - the western terminus of the Schull and Skibbereen Railway, a narrow-gauge line that opened in 1886 and closed for good in 1953. The trackbed is gone, but the town's small grid of streets still pivots around where the station used to be.

Schull's history runs deep. The Altar Wedge Tomb, six kilometres west, was built between 3000 and 2000 BC; ringforts and fulacht fiadh sites dot the surrounding townlands. The medieval church in Schull's graveyard was first referenced - alongside the town itself - in Pope Innocent III's 1199 letter. In the early 17th century, the townland of Leamcon near Schull was a pirate stronghold, part of a thriving West Cork pirate economy that included Baltimore and Whiddy Island. The Great Famine of the 1840s hit West Cork brutally. Daisy Goodwin's 2007 book Silver River devotes a section to her three-times great-grandfather, the Rector of Skull - Robert Traill (1793-1847) - and his efforts to alleviate the suffering of his parish. Traill himself died of typhus contracted while ministering to the sick. The town's older medieval church fell into ruin when the Holy Trinity church was built closer to the modern centre, and the old churchyard now holds the famine-era graves of people Traill could not save.

Schull Community College operates one of the few planetariums in Ireland, an unexpected addition for a village of this size. The school has produced its share of unusual graduates. Fionn Ferreira, who won the 2019 Google Science Fair with a project on removing microplastics from water using a magnetic ferrofluid, attended Schull Community College. Two notable astronomers were born in the area: Ralph Allan Sampson, who became Astronomer Royal for Scotland, and his brother in a different field - John Sampson, a linguist who became one of the world's foremost scholars of Romani language and culture. Timothy O'Hea, born in the Schull area, received the Victoria Cross - the British military's highest decoration - for actions during his service. The English singer-songwriter Colin Vearncombe, known professionally as Black, lived in Schull until his death in 2016. The list, for a small town, is unusually long.

On the night of 23 December 1996, the French television producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier was murdered at her holiday home in Dreenane, near Toormore, just outside Schull. She was 39. The case remains unsolved by Irish authorities thirty years later, despite enormous investigative effort and one high-profile suspect who was ultimately convicted in absentia by a French court in 2019 but has consistently denied involvement and has never been extradited or convicted in Ireland. The murder shadowed Schull for years afterward. Documentary makers, journalists, and true-crime podcasters have returned to the town again and again, looking for the detail that breaks the case open. None has. The town has continued its life around the unanswered question. The Schull Show, an agricultural fair, takes place in Schull Town Park each July. The August regatta fills the harbour. The planetarium opens its dome. Mount Gabriel watches over all of it, with the radar domes blinking through the West Cork night - a town that holds, in roughly equal measure, a long history of cultivation and a recent history of grief, and gets on with the work of being itself.