Stotfield, now absorbed into Lossiemouth, was a small ferm toun in Moray whose name derives from the Old English Stodfauld, meaning "horse field." The English-origin name suggests it was settled by incomers, possibly Anglian settlers from the Lothians planted by King David I of Scotland after he suppressed a rebellion by the Mormaer of Moray in 1130. By the early 19th century, the village had developed a fishing economy alongside its farming roots. Three skaffie-style boats, each crewed by seven men, constituted the entire fleet. The boats were small, open-hulled, two-masted vessels with dipping lug sails and short keels -- light enough to haul onto the beach but dangerously unstable in bad weather.

Christmas morning began calm, fair, and mild. The fishermen reached their grounds a mile or two offshore early, well within sight of land. As the morning progressed, the wind strengthened. By midday, the weather had turned violently, and a south-westerly gale drove the three boats away from land and down the firth. The men were powerful oarsmen, but in open boats with no deck and no shelter, they had nothing to set against the ferocity of the storm. All three boats were overwhelmed. All twenty-one souls aboard them were drowned. A weather diary kept at Gordon Castle in Fochabers recorded temperatures dropping from 50 to 39 degrees Fahrenheit as a weather front passed through, with winds reaching hurricane force that blew down trees across the estate.

The Aberdeen Journal reported the disaster in January 1807: "Three boats belonging to Stotfield, were lost, containing 21 seamen, who have left 17 widows and 42 children, besides aged parents and other helpless relations to lament their fate." The paper also recorded losses elsewhere that same day -- three men at Burghead, seven at Rottenslough near Buckie, seven at Avoch in Ross-shire. Across the region, thirty-seven fishermen died, leaving 31 widows, 89 children, and 56 aged parents or other dependents "now rendered totally destitute." A national collection raised over 1,075 pounds for relief. By 1841, thirty-five years later, eight of the Stotfield widows were still alive and still receiving support from the fund.

In March 1807, the Aberdeen Journal published an advertisement offering bounties to fishermen who would settle in Stotfield and crew the village's boats: seven guineas a year for three years for the first crew, diminishing rates for the second and third. Whether anyone answered the call directly is unknown, but the Garden brothers from the Buckie area are recorded as settling in Stotfield around this time. The village slowly rebuilt, though the memory of what had been lost never faded. Stotfield's disaster was smaller in absolute numbers than the Moray Firth fishing disaster of 1848 or the Eyemouth disaster of 1881, but its impact was arguably worse. Those other tragedies struck larger communities that could absorb the losses. Stotfield lost everything -- every boat, every fisherman, every young man -- in a single afternoon.