The Bandstand Hotel fries its haddock in a batter made with local ale and serves it looking out over the Moray Firth, from a bar that has been CAMRA's Highlands and Western Isles Pub of the Year four times, most recently in 2025. The kitchen, run by Iain Gordon, also does Cullen skink, haggis pakora, a baked cod in tomato and nduja stew, and breaded chicken stuffed with ham and smoked cheese. The ales rotate rather than sit still, and there's a beer garden too.
Nairn keeps its bars varied. Jacko's Bar and Diner is on Harbour Street in Fishertown, with a pool table, a jukebox and dogs allowed. The Havelock runs a weekly quiz and live music in its garden. One One Two on the Brae pours small sharing plates and keeps a sister wine shop two doors down.
For a self-catered stay the High Street offers several useful food shops. Ashers Bakery has two branches for pies, sausage rolls and cakes. Bruce Clark & Sons is the family butcher, selling Scotch beef and its own ready meals and pies. Swanson's is the greengrocer, and stocks bird food and firewood alongside the fruit and veg. The Highland Weigh is a zero-waste café with an in-store peanut-butter maker.
The town sits where the River Nairn meets the firth, seventeen miles east of Inverness, with long sandy beaches and low dunes running east into Culbin Forest. Walk from East Beach through Kingsteps towards Culbin and you cross sand, a burn, boggy woodland, pine forest and saltmarsh over about six miles; the burn can be impassable at high tide or after heavy rain, so check before you set out. Shorter, the River Nairn Circuit loops five kilometres through riverside and woodland, and a longer path follows the river nine kilometres to Cawdor.
Nairn grew up as an ancient fishing port. Its Gaelic name, Inbhir Narann, means the mouth of the river. Thomas Telford drew up a plan in 1820 that cut a direct opening and built the wharf, and by 1847 the harbour worked twelve large boats and sixty-two herring boats. Whole Fishertown families lived off the fishing: the women making and mending nets, digging bait, gutting, smoking and salting, and knitting the woollen gansies the men wore at sea. The herring collapsed in the 1920s and 1930s once the harbour mouth silted, and the rebuilt 1930s harbour came too late to change it.
The railway from Inverness arrived in 1855 and turned the town into a health resort. By the 1880s more than half its visitors were coming from London and the south. Charlie Chaplin took his holidays at the Newton Hotel, renting the second floor and walking the harbour and High Street. On his 1773 journey, later published in 1775, Samuel Johnson wrote: "At Nairn we may fix the verge of the Highlands; for here I first saw peat fires, and first heard the Erse language."
Nairn Old Parish Church went up between 1893 and 1897 to a design by John Starforth, with a hundred-foot tower, a horseshoe gallery and a marble font carved by Andrew Davidson and given in 1899. There are two championship links, Nairn Golf Club and Nairn Dunbar, and a museum in Regency Viewfield House that keeps the Fishertown story. Cawdor Castle is six miles off, Brodie Castle the same distance east, and Culloden about twelve. Trains run from the town's own station to Inverness, and the A96 passes straight through.
At high tide, dolphins can sometimes be seen at the river entrance. Watch for them from the front.