Monkey puzzle Did the Scots do the deed?

Hartlepool’s monkey-hanging legend may have come from up the coast in Boddam, near Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, where villagers purportedly captured and hanged one in 1772 as they could only claim salvage rights of a wreck if there were no survivors. It inspired a popular song at the time and Fiona-jane

Brown, a folklorist at Aberdeen’s Elphinstone Institute, suggests it made its way down to Teesside, where the incident became linked to Hartlepool.