1784 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

• 9 February – Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland founded as the Highland Society of Edinburgh.
• May – the Buchanites are expelled from Irvine, going on to establish a celibate community at New Cample near Closeburn, Dumfriesshire.
• 25 & 27 August – apothecary James Tytler makes the first balloon ascents in Great Britain, in a hot air balloon from Edinburgh.
• 14 November – Samuel Seabury is consecrated at the house of John Skinner, coadjutor bishop of Aberdeen, as first Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut, the first bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States.
• Highland estates whose revenues were forfeited to the government by their proprietors following the Jacobite rising of 1745 are restored to their legal heirs on discharge of debts. The accrued funds are primarily applied to completion of the Forth and Clyde Canal.
• "Wash Act" reduces excise duty on Scotch whisky and provides a definition of the Highland Line.
• St Andrew's Church in New Town, Edinburgh, opened.

  Births

• 11 January – Thomas Hamilton, architect
• 20 February – Adam Black, publisher
• 18 May – William Tennant, poet
• 17 July – John Campbell, surgeon
• 27 August – William Cargill, first Superintendent of Otago Province
• 25 September – James Bremner, shipbuilder and salvor
• 7 December – Allan Cunningham, poet and artistic biographer

  Deaths

• 29 January – George Bogle of Daldowie, tobacco and sugar merchant and Rector of the University of Glasgow
• 13 February – William Burnes, farmer, father of Robert Burns
• 10 August – Allan Ramsay, portrait painter
• 20 May – Alexander Ross, poet

  The arts

• 22 May – English actress Sarah Siddons makes her Scottish debut in Edinburgh.