1869 in Scotland

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria

  Law officers

• Lord Advocate – James Moncreiff until October; then George Young
• Solicitor General for Scotland – George Young; then Andrew Rutherfurd-Clark

  Judiciary

• Lord President of the Court of Session and Lord Justice General – Lord Glencorse
• Lord Justice Clerk – Lord Moncreiff

  Events

• 5 January – Scotland's oldest professional Association football team, Kilmarnock F.C., is founded.
• 13 January – the story magazine The People's Friend is first published in Dundee; it will continue to be published by D. C. Thomson & Co. more than 140 years later.
• 27 March – the Japanese ironclad Ryūjō is launched at Alexander Hall and Company's shipyard in Aberdeen.
• 13 September – the Solway Junction Railway is opened for iron ore traffic, including a 1 mile 8 chain viaduct across the Solway Firth.
• October – the 'Edinburgh Seven', led by Sophia Jex-Blake, start to attend lectures at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, the first women in the UK to do so.
• 22 November – the clipper ship Cutty Sark is launched in Dumbarton, one of the last clippers built and the only one to survive in the UK.
• The Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer first takes up residence at St. Mary's Monastery, Kinnoull, Perth, the first Roman Catholic monastery established in Scotland since the Reformation.
• Construction of Inverness Cathedral is finished.
• An Episcopal chapel from St Andrews is moved stone by stone in fishing boats to Buckhaven and re-erected there.
• The Caledonian Brewery is established in Shandon, Edinburgh, by George Lorimer and Robert Clark.
• Thomas McCall of Kilmarnock builds two velocipedes driven by levers to cranks on the rear wheel.
• Glasgow University Rugby Football Club is founded.

  Births

• 26 January – George Douglas Brown, novelist
• 14 February – Charles Wilson, physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
• 11 June – Walford Bodie, stage magician

  Deaths

• 11 July – William Jerdan, journalist
• 20 September – George Patton, Lord Glenalmond, judge