Inverness is a community on the southwest shore of Tomales Bay, about 19 miles (31 km) southeast of Bodega Bay in a straight line and 3.5 miles (5.6 km) northwest of Point Reyes Station, California. A Scottish landowner named it after the city in Scotland. It is largely residential, with little industry besides tourism. Tomales Bay, a long, narrow inlet of the Pacific Ocean, is about 12 miles (20 km) long and up to 1.2 miles (2 km) wide, and it all but separates the Point Reyes Peninsula from the Marin County mainland. The bay lies along a submerged stretch of the San Andreas Fault, which slips 0.7 to 1.2 inches (17-30 mm) a year here and ruptured through the bay in the great earthquake of 1906. East of the fault lies the landslide-prone Franciscan Complex, a mix of Jurassic and Cretaceous graywacke, shale and conglomerate. To the west is Cretaceous granite, capped on Inverness Ridge by Miocene Monterey Shale. The central bay floor, directly overlying the fault, is a layer of unconsolidated alluvium consisting mostly of clay, silt, sand and gravel.

This is the ancestral home of the Coast Miwok, who lived in small, largely independent family groups along the shores of what are now Marin and Sonoma counties. Villages ringed Tomales Bay, where fishing and hunting sustained people and shells served as currency. Spanish missions baptized 2,828 Coast Miwok between 1783 and 1834, upending village life. Congress then never ratified the 18 treaties of 1851-52 that would have set aside reservations for California tribes, leaving most of the Miwok landless and many dispersed or worked for wages. Their descendants, the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, regained federal recognition in 2000. In 1857 a San Francisco law firm, Shafter, Shafter, Park and Heydenfeldt, won title to more than 50,000 acres (20,000 ha) at Point Reyes after a tangle of land disputes. The Shafter brothers bought out their partners and leased the land to dairy farmers, who sent butter to San Francisco. Inverness was founded in 1889 as a subdivision of land owned by James Shafter and became a summer resort where people from San Francisco and Oakland camped, hiked and swam. Many built cabins that still stand. By the 1910s, launches carried day-trippers to secluded beaches from Brock Schreiber’s boathouse (built around 1913), listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

Tomales Bay is now included in the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, and is also a Ramsar wetland of international importance, holding about 1,300 acres of eelgrass beds, roughly 9% of the 14,600 acres mapped in California. The beds shelter fish, serve as spawning ground for Pacific herring, feed migratory birds such as black brant along the Pacific flyway, and store carbon. The sanctuary rules ban anchoring in seven zones covering 22% of the bay’s surface to protect the eelgrass. Oyster farming is a major industry. The two largest producers, Hog Island Oyster Company and Tomales Bay Oyster Company, sell to the public and have picnic grounds on the eastern shore. West of the bay, cattle ranching on land leased from Point Reyes National Seashore largely ended in April 2026, when 12 of 14 ranches left under a settlement; two remain. Inverness, home to 1,379 people at the 2020 census (median age 61), is hemmed in by parkland and serves visitors to the seashore and Tomales Bay State Park. Read more here and here. Explore more of Inverness and Tomales Bay here: