1817 in Scotland

Incumbents

• Monarch – George III

  Law officers

• Lord Advocate – Alexander Maconochie
• Solicitor General for Scotland – James Wedderburn

  Judiciary

• Lord President of the Court of Session – Lord Granton
• Lord Justice General – The Duke of Montrose
• Lord Justice Clerk – Lord Boyle

  Events

• 25 January – The Scotsman is first published in Edinburgh as a liberal weekly newspaper by lawyer William Ritchie and customs official Charles Maclaren.
• 1 March – suffocating fumes in the Leadhills lead mine kill seven.
• 1 April – Blackwood's Magazine is launched as the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, a Tory publication. In October the publisher, William Blackwood, relaunches it as Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.
• June – Union Canal authorised.
• 10 July – David Brewster patents the kaleidoscope.
• 15 October – school of whales seen in the Tay.
• November – Thomas Chalmers, in a sermon, appeals for a Christian effort to deal with the social condition of Glasgow.
• 4 December – The Inverness Courier is first published as a newspaper by John and Christian Isobel Johnstone.
• Dingwall Canal completed.
• A typhus epidemic occurs in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
• Dufftown founded by James Duff, 4th Earl Fife, in Moray.
• St Andrew's Cathedral, Aberdeen, opened as St Andrew's Chapel within the Episcopal Church.
• Calton Gaol, Edinburgh, completed.
• Old Tolbooth, Edinburgh, demolished.
• Glasgow Botanic Gardens created.
• Corsewall Lighthouse, designed by Robert Stevenson, first illuminated.
• Thomas Telford's ferry piers at Invergordon and Inverbreakie are built.
• Bladnoch distillery founded by John and Thomas McClelland near Wigtown.
• Teaninich distillery founded by Hugh Munro at Alness.
• The post of Regius Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow is established by King George III.
• Approximate date – the Kilmarnock and Troon Railway introduces into service The Duke, the first steam locomotive on a railway in Scotland.

  Births

• February – Samuel Morison Brown, chemist, poet and essayist
• 15 February – Robert Angus Smith, atmospheric chemist
• 28 February – Walter Hood Fitch, botanical artist
• 9 April – Alexander Thomson, Greek Revival architect
• 29 April – Adam White, zoologist
• 17 May
• * Thomas Davidson, palaeontologist
• * John Ross, explorer
• 22 May – James Macaulay, physician and literary editor
• 1 June – David Lyall, botanist
• 16 June – Alexander Forbes, bishop of Brechin
• 25 August – William Graham, wine merchant, art patron and Liberal politician
• 8 September – Stephen Hislop, Free Church missionary and geologist
• 16 September – William Smith, architect
• 21 September – John Allan Broun, magnetologist
• 12 October – William Collins, publisher, Lord Provost of Glasgow and temperance activist
• 17 October – Alexander Mitchell, banker, railroad financier and Democratic politician
• 29 October – Angus Macmillan, shipbuilder and politician on Prince Edward Island
• 4 December – Thomas Thomson, military surgeon and botanist
• 10 December – Alexander Wood, physician and inventor of the hypodermic syringe
• John Millar, Lord Craighill, Solicitor General
• Approximate date – Marion Kirkland Reid, feminist

  Deaths

• 8 February – Francis Horner, Whig politician, journalist, lawyer and political economist
• 3 September – James Byres of Tonley, art dealer
• 2 October – Alexander Monro, anatomist
• 8 October – Henry Erskine, lawyer and Whig politician

  The arts

• 19 September – the body of poet Robert Burns is moved to a new mausoleum in Dumfries.
• 31 December – Walter Scott's novel Rob Roy is published anonymously.