Delnies Ice House, Nairn

Delnies Ice House and Bothy are the sole surviving buildings from the Easter Delnies Fishing Station, situated on the course of The Nairn Golf Club between the 9th green and the 10th tee, close to the south coast of the Moray Firth.

The ice house dates to 1877 and was constructed as a cold store for the fishing station. Built into the shore, it is constructed of stone with harled lower walls. It features a barrel-vaulted roof topped with turf. The interior comprises a storage chamber and a smaller entrance chamber separated by a large weighted timber door. A small opening in the rear wall served for loading ice. The north wall contains the main entrance with a replacement door, above which is a stone plaque engraved with the date 1877 and the initials 'J A'.

The bothy was built between 1904 and 1908. It is an early 20th-century, detached single-storey building with an attic, arranged as a three-bay rectangle. It may have been constructed using fabric taken from the earlier Easter Delnies Fishing Station building that stood by the shore. The bothy is built in painted rubble and contains one room with timber floorboards and a fireplace on the east wall. Window openings have replacement uPVC sash and case glazing and replacement exterior timber shutters. The roof is slated with straight skews and a chimneystack rises from the east gable. A plaque from 2011 commemorating both buildings hangs on its east gable.

Historical Context

The ice house first appears on the 2nd Edition Ordnance Survey map (revised 1894, published 1896). By the revised 1904 and published 1905 edition, it is identified as the ice house for Easter Delnies Fishing Station, shown alongside an earlier fishing station building further north by the shoreline. Both structures appear also on a map within the Minute of Lease between Earl Cawdor and the Nairn Golf Club dated 1899.

A historic photograph titled "End Hole and Fisherman's Hut" in Horace Hutchinson's "British Links Golf" (1897) shows Easter Delnies Fishing Station with a building of very similar design to the present bothy – three bay, central door, and east gable chimney. The bothy itself does not appear on the 2nd Edition map but is shown in its current location adjacent to the ice house on the third edition map (revised 1908-09, published 1911), indicating construction between 1904 and 1908-09. The earlier Easter Delnies Fishing Station no longer appears on maps from 1908-09 onwards. Photographic and cartographic evidence suggests that some fabric from the dismantled earlier station may have been reused in the bothy, and its design and plan may have been replicated.

Nairn has a long history of fishing, particularly in salmon, herring, and white fish. Fishing was economically significant from the 18th century onwards. Salmon fishing from coble boats was organized commercially along the Moray coast from around 1768, when a fishing station was established at the mouth of the River Spey at Tugnet. The Easter Delnies land was owned by the Earl of Cawdor, and the fishing station was later managed by James Adamson of Nairn until the Moray Firth Salmon Fishing Company was formed in 1920.

By the late 19th century, five salmon fishing stations operated between the Old Bar (east of Nairn) and Fort George to the west. These remote stations typically maintained their own ice houses and bothies to store catches and shelter fishermen. Of the five, Delnies Ice House and Bothy are the only buildings known to survive largely unaltered from this historic Moray Coast salmon fishing network.

An early 20th-century photograph shows golfers on the 9th green with coble boats and salmon nets visible on the foreshore. By the early 1980s, salmon stocks had dwindled and the Moray Firth Salmon Fishing Company ceased trading. The Nairn Golf Club purchased the ice house and bothy from the Cawdor Estate in 1987. In the 2010s, the bothy was renovated and has served as a halfway house and refreshment point for golfers, while the ice house is currently used as a store.