The Star Inn stands at 8 High Street, a bar and restaurant that has traded here since 2015 and cooks from family recipes. On Sundays it lays out a carvery of roast lamb, gammon and beef with vegetables, the meat coming from Upper Raddery Farm and the seafood from Scrabster; there are vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free options too. Out the back there is a garden, which has hosted live music, pool and darts. The Gun Lodge, which some walking guides still name as a refreshment stop, closed in early 2024, so plan your afternoon around the Star instead.
Ardersier is a former fishing village on the southern edge of the Inner Moray Firth, wedged between the shore and a steep raised beach that rises behind the houses. Just over a kilometre out, the firth pinches to its narrowest between Ardersier Point and Chanonry Point across the water, which helps explain why the promontory to the north-west carries a fort.
For everyday supplies there is a SPAR on Station Road with fresh fruit and vegetables, fresh meat, food-to-go, an ATM and a Barista Bar, and a community pharmacy at 10 High Street running NHS Pharmacy First Scotland, with step-free access. Cameron Drive Play Area, beside the primary school, keeps younger children occupied.
The best of the village is the walking. A flat, two-kilometre shore path follows the Moray Firth toward Fort George, suitable for all abilities, and it is a good stretch for seabirds, seals and, on a lucky day, dolphins working the narrow channel. Shorter gravel and shingle paths thread the coast, and a little further out is Ardersier Common, an 18.9-hectare coastal reserve open all year from a car park on the B9006. The Common mixes scrub, shingle and species-rich grassland; small blue butterflies are the thing to look for.
Fort George itself sits 1.4 miles along that signposted path, on the low, exposed spit of Ardersier Point. It is a Category A artillery fortress, designed by Major-General William Skinner and built largely between 1748 and 1769 by the Adam family practice in the years after the Jacobite Rising of 1745–46. It was planned to hold around 1,600 infantry and has never stopped being a working military base, which means the odd loud bang and low-flying helicopter come with a visit. Historic Environment Scotland notes that in all its long service it "never fired a shot in anger." Inside are ramparts, barracks, a chapel, the grand magazine and the Highlanders' Museum, plus a café, picnic area and benches; dogs are welcome outdoors but not under a roof. Look, too, for the three K6 telephone kiosks standing together in a lane at the fort.
The fort helped shape the village. It had first been intended for Inverness, but a dispute with the burgh council pushed it out to the spit, and its construction drew workers into a new settlement called Campbelltown, with Stuarton across the road; the two were later folded together as Ardersier. Much later the J. Ray McDermott yard built offshore oil platforms here for nearly thirty years, employing more than 3,000 people at its peak, until it closed in 2002.
Up at the old kirkton, a burial ground holds good eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gravestones; its small rectangular watch-house, in the north-west corner, is all that survives of the clay-built parish church of 1769, which was already ruinous by 1792. A later nineteenth-century church stands on the High Street, and on the last day of 1997 Helen Mirren married the director Taylor Hackford in a small Ardersier church, choosing it, she wrote afterwards, because his Scottish roots made the place feel right.
Inverness Airport station at Dalcross has step-free access and free parking, and Stagecoach's 11 and 11A run through the village to Nairn, the airport and Inverness, roughly five and a half and nine and a half miles away. George Grant, born here, gathered a picture-history of the place from local and emigrant families, and put it simply: "I wanted to chronicle a place close to my heart."