The picture in poet-author Kate Ashton’s hallway says it all: ‘Nairn is my Heart’s Delight’.
The popular seaside town on the Moray coast is quite definitely in her heart, and has been there for a number of years.
After a long stint in the Netherlands, Kate returned to her native Scotland some twenty years ago, and settled in Forres.
She moved to Nairn more than a decade ago, describing the move as “not a very conscious choice.”
She said: “I just discovered I kept coming back to Nairn for the bookshop, for the festival, for the sea, for our very lovely little antique shop that used to exist here, the community centre, one thing and another kept bringing me back to Nairn so I got fed up with commuting and just thought, surely I could rent somewhere here, so I did.
“As soon as my feet touched the ground here I felt at home… I realised Nairn doesn’t have a centre, it has a heart and soul that is expressed in all kinds of more quietly and less quietly beautiful ways.
“I just felt that, and it’s become more and more true.”
Here’s Kate’s five reasons for falling in love with Nairn life…
1. Nairn’s cultural scene
Nairn’s community centre and cultural scene continue to blow Kate away.
“The community centre is quite extraordinary, there’s something on almost every evening in there that one wants to go to.
“There’s a sort of feeding of the soul, a spiritual sustenance in the cultural climate in Nairn.”
The crowning glory of Nairn’s culture scene is its annual Book & Arts Festival, an ever-growing magnet for important literary and artistic figures.
It’s even in the Royal radar, and was opened by Queen Camilla, then Duchess of Rothesay, in 2021.
Kate said: “The literary scene is very vibrant in a typically Nairn modest way, some really wonderful and important writers speak about their work at the festival every year.
“The music scene in Nairn is just as vibrant, ranges from jazz to blues, to classical soloists who come and play at the community centre.
“The book festival is a whole week of extraordinary events, with children and adults alike.
“It’s a week where it becomes more and more difficult to find on the programme what you want to miss.”
2. Nairn’s Fishertown
Kate loves to stroll around the oldest part of Nairn, the fishing village of Fishertown.
These days it’s full of holiday cottages and incomers.
“Fishertown feels spiritually almost unchanged the way the community quietly coheres, it remains intact.
“In Nairn, people come and go but the community survives the incomers and the tourists, although it’s true that at the end of September when the Highland Games are over many people here say ah, now it’s our town again.
“But Nairn is always Nairn. Its personality is very unpretentiously, lastingly true.”
3. Nairn’s people and shops
“I get creative inspiration from the people – it’s a very giving town.
“There are old shops on the High Street like Frasers, the electricians, which sort of has a feeling that it’s been there forever, and the butcher, old shops that have been there for a long, long time, and operate in such a simply community way.
“And there are absolutely stunning new additions to the town like the One One Two, a wine bar, and now the Grapemonger, its own wine shop which is positively chic, and you can just sit and have a glass of wine very quietly there, and come out onto the High Street and wonder how it’s possible!”
4. The importance of the sea
Kate walks along the shore, swims in the sea and, an expert oarswoman, she also rows upon it in the community skiff.
She said: “To walk down the street and onto the beach and then on and on beside the sea is the most enormous privilege.
“To look over at the Black Isle and Cromarty and feel the world of the Highlands stretching north and west, it’s very beautiful and very tranquil and that’s very sustaining for any creative work I think.
“I go in the sea quite a lot here in the summer and you’re not aware of the damage humans are doing to the environment when you’re in the sea here, because it feels really clean and it smells really clean.”
5. Nairn is a source of creative inspiration
Kate thinks about this for a minute, and then realises her poetry properly took off when she started living in Nairn.
“I’ve only been really having books published of my poetry since I lived in Nairn, nearly all the poems were written here.
“My favourite beach is the East Beach, and it features in a poem in my latest book of poems, Matronymics.”
Kate’s next book is a double biography, ‘Mirrored Minds: Søren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen’. It will be published next year.
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