The Boath Doocot stands at the top of Dooket Hill, a seventeenth-century tower seven and a half metres high, built on an ancient motte, with 515 nesting boxes ranged inside its walls. Steps climb to it, and a panel at the top explains the battle it looks down on. Livestock graze the slope, so a dog wants keeping close. From up here you get the clearest view of Auldearn: undulating farmland about 3km (two miles) east of Nairn, the rises and open fields, and the village gathered below.
A two-minute walk down the hill is The 1645 Inn. The McMahon family bought it in 2019 and renamed it for the battle. The building started life as a mill and spent years as The Millstone hotel from 1973; it now has fourteen bedrooms, a public bar, and a bistro, FORTYFIVEBistro, cooking from local and seasonal produce.
At the north edge of the village, Boath House sets a grander table. Archibald Simpson designed the house in 1830 for Captain Sir James Dunbar of the Royal Navy, replacing the family's mid-sixteenth-century "great stane-house"; its polished east front carries a fluted Ionic portico. Dinner is served in the Kale Yard, out in the walled garden, with breakfast and afternoon tea in the house itself, and the kitchen works from organic fruit, herbs and vegetables grown in its own gardens.
The parish church dates from 1757 and stands beside the ruin of the medieval church it replaced. John Robertson of Inverness reworked the newer building in 1898, giving it circular traceried windows, a bowed pulpit and a serpentine gallery front; outside are a rubble-walled burial ground and a circular ashlar sundial. The old ruin to the east keeps its Gothic stonework, a 1641 sepulchre carved with the arms of the Kinnard family, and a wall memorial of 1563 to Ihone Hay of Loch Loy.
On 9 May 1645, James Graham, Marquess of Montrose, defeated the Covenanter army here, forming his main body out of sight before a counterattack while the hill, the enclosures and the marshy ground funnelled the fighting. Battle Hill and Dead Man's Wood still appear on the map. Exactly how the day unfolded is still argued over.
Sixteen years later, in 1661, Isobel Gowdie of Lochloy was tried for witchcraft. Her confessions were extraordinarily detailed: shape-shifting into a jackdaw, a cat and a hare, meetings by night in the old kirk, flights on corn stalks, journeys to Elfane. She described the Devil as "a meikle, black, roch man". She was found guilty and taken to Gallowhill to be strangled and burned.
Nairn is two miles west, with a long Central Beach running out to the harbour and views over the Moray Firth. Brodie Castle lies east along the A96, its estate, pond and shrubbery walks free to wander and the eighth-century Pictish Rodney's Stone standing in the grounds. Cawdor Castle is a little south-west; Johnson and Boswell called in 1773, and Burns in 1787. The A96 skirts the north edge of the village on its way to Inverness, Forres and Elgin, Stagecoach services 10 and 11 stop along it, and the nearest trains run from Nairn on the Inverness–Aberdeen line. Auldearn kept its own station from 1895 to 1960; the trains still pass the spot, but they no longer stop.
The village keeps a play area on George Wilson Road, and the Auldearn Burn runs on past the old mill and west to join the River Nairn.