1847 in Scotland

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria

  Law officers

• Lord Advocate – Andrew Rutherfurd
• Solicitor General for Scotland – Thomas Maitland

  Judiciary

• Lord President of the Court of Session and Lord Justice General – Lord Boyle
• Lord Justice Clerk – Lord Hope

  Events

• 25 April – the brig Exmouth carrying emigrants from Derry bound for Quebec is wrecked off Islay with only three survivors from more than 250 on board.
• 4 May – Glenalmond College opens its doors.
• 17 May – Edinburgh, Leith and Newhaven Railway extends through Scotland Street Tunnel to a new southern terminus in Princes Street, Edinburgh.
• 17 August – Queen Victoria arrives in HMY Victoria and Albert off Greenock at the start of a visit to Scotland.
• 18 September – Educational Institute of Scotland formally constituted as a teachers' union "for the purpose of promoting sound learning and of advancing the interests of education in Scotland".
• 4–8 November – James Young Simpson discovers the anaesthetic properties of chloroform and first uses it, successfully, on a patient, in an obstetric case in Edinburgh.
• 23 November – the Otago Association ship Philip Laing sets sail from Greenock carrying settlers, mostly from the Free Church of Scotland, bound for Port Chalmers in New Zealand.
• The congregations of the United Secession Church unite with most of those of the Relief Church to form the United Presbyterian Church.
• The Ordnance Survey confirms Ben Nevis as the highest mountain in the British Isles, ahead of Ben Macdui.
• Michael Nairn begins manufacture of floorcloth at Kirkcaldy.
• Thomas Guthrie publishes A Plea for Ragged Schools in Edinburgh.

  Births

• 29 January – John Ramsay, 13th Earl of Dalhousie, KT, Liberal politician, former Secretary for Scotland
• 8 February – Lord Francis Douglas, mountaineer
• 13 February – Sir Robert McAlpine, 1st Baronet, "Concrete Bob", founder of construction firm Sir Robert McAlpine
• 3 March – Alexander Graham Bell, scientist and inventor
• 28 March – Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson, art critic
• 27 April – Archibald Orr-Ewing, MP
• 2 July – Andrew Gray, physicist and mathematician
• 28 July – James Lindsay, 26th Earl of Crawford, politician, astronomer and bibliophile
• 3 August – John Hamilton-Gordon, 1st Marquess of Aberdeen and Temair, KT, GCMG, GCVO, PC, former Governor General of Canada
• 22 August – Alexander Mackenzie, composer
• 12 September – John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute, KT, landowner and Rector of the University of St Andrews

  Deaths

• 23 March – Archibald Simpson, architect
• 31 May – Thomas Chalmers, mathematician and a leader of the Free Church of Scotland
• 7 June – David Mushet, metallurgist
• 9 August – Andrew Combe, physician and phrenologist
• 29 August – William Simson, painter best known as a landscapist
• 20 November – Henry Francis Lyte, Anglican divine and hymn-writer
• 7 December – Robert Liston, pioneering surgeon

  The arts

• R. M. Ballantyne returns to Edinburgh from Canada.
• Charles Lees paints The Golfers.
• The Sobieski Stuarts' fictional Tales of the Century: or Sketches of the romance of history between the years 1746 and 1846 is published.