•57 



none at hand for them to beg, borrow, or steal, Colonel Durand 

 having taken the precaution of requesting the county magistrates 

 "to issue warrants for bringing into the town (Carlisle) all the 

 ladders within seven miles round and further, which was immedi- 

 ately complied with and the ladders brought in" (ib, p. 73). John 

 Heward, who survived his work at Warwick Bridge seventy-six 

 years, must needs have died a very old man. His age, in Brampton 

 parish register and on his tombstone, is given as a hundred. But 

 he was not quite a centenarian ; for, according to the register of 

 his native parish, Kirklinton, his parents were married November 

 10, 1719; their eldest child, Eleanor, was baptized December 4, 

 1720; and John, their second child, was baptized March 18, 

 1 721-2 (old style). He had therefore at his death almost, if not 

 quite, entered his hundredth year. His grand-daughter, Miss 

 Lydia Hewitt, of Brampton, now in her eighty-fouith year, says 

 she had long in her possession an account which he wrote of his 

 adventures whilst with the army ; which she cannot now find. It 

 is to be hoped it may yet be recovered. Meanwhile Miss Hewitt, 

 who in her seventeenth year heard part of the story of the '45 

 from one who was a grown man when he made ladders for Prince 

 Charlie, is an interesting link with one of the most romantic 

 episodes of the last century. 



Another Brampton man, destined to achieve greater notoriety 

 than John Heward as a reputed centenarian, and well remembered 

 by some old persons still living in or near Brampton, was in 1745 

 with the militia at Carlisle ; the famous Robert Bowman, whose 

 epitaph in Irthington churchyard states that "he died i8th June, 

 1823, at the patriarchal age of 119 years". I call him a Brampton 

 man, not because of his alleged birth at Briggwoodfoot, Brampton, 

 in 1705, but because of his description in 1755 as "of this parish" 

 in his marriage register at Brampton. His experience as a 

 defender of Carlisle was thus related by himself to the late Mr. 

 Robert Bell of Irthington Nook : 



The cannon balls were coming rattling into the town from Stanwix Bank like 

 hail ; and besides we were starving of hunger. For my part I had nothing but 

 a basin of broth during three days ; so in the night I scrambled over the city 

 wall, and cut off for home (R. Bell's Tractate on the Roman Wall, p. 9). 



