Ippenschied lies in the southern Hunsrück between the Soonwald and the former NATO airfield at Pferdsfeld, in what is now Bad Sobernheim’s northern municipal exclave.

Archaeological finds made within municipal limits bear witness to people living and settling in the Ippenschied area as far back as Roman times.

After French Revolutionary troops had overrun and occupied the German lands on the Rhine’s left bank in 1794, the village belonged to the Canton of Sobernheim in the Department of Rhin-et-Moselle from 1798 to 1814.

Under the terms of the Congress of Vienna, the region, and Ippenschied along with it, passed in 1815 to the Kingdom of Prussia, within which it was grouped into the Kreuznach district in the Regierungsbezirk of Koblenz.

The municipality's arms might in English heraldic language be described thus: Sable a fess countercompony gules and argent between a plough and a billhooklike clearing knife, both Or.