1786 in Scotland

Incumbents

• Monarch – George III

  Law officers

• Lord Advocate – Ilay Campbell
• Solicitor General for Scotland – Robert Dundas of Arniston

  Judiciary

• Lord President of the Court of Session – Lord Arniston, the younger
• Lord Justice General – The Viscount Stormont
• Lord Justice Clerk – Lord Barskimming

  Events

• Northern Lighthouse Board formed as the Commissioners of Northern Light Houses by Act of Parliament largely at the urging of the lawyer and politician "Honest" George Dempster, to oversee the construction and operation of four Scottish lighthouses: Kinnaird Head, North Ronaldsay, Scalpay and Mull of Kintyre.
• New Lanark established in South Lanarkshire by David Dale, as a model cotton milling community.
• Millwright Andrew Meikle invents a practical threshing machine.

  Births

• 28 February – Christian Ramsay, botanist
• 23 August – John Clunies-Ross, settler of the Cocos Islands
• 18 September – George Beattie, poet

  Deaths

• 2 June – Dugald Buchanan, Scottish Gaelic religious poet
• 16 October – Alexander Wilson, surgeon, type founder, astronomer, meteorologist and mathematician
• c. 20 October – Mary Campbell, dairymaid, beloved of Robert Burns
• 10 November – John Hope, physician and botanist

  The arts

• April – 14 May – Robert Burns has an affair with Mary Campbell.
• 31 July – Robert Burns' Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect is published by John Wilson in Kilmarnock. The volume proves so popular that Burns abandons his plans to emigrate to Jamaica on 1 September for a post as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation and on 27-28 November journeys on a borrowed pony from Mossgiel Farm for his first visit to Edinburgh. Two weeks later he extemporises his "" which is first published on 19 December in the Caledonian Mercury.