Deposition – John Hetherington – 28 Nov 1757

John Hetherington, 58, of the Hope in Whitfield, lived at the charge of the parish at a house in Whitfield and is maintained by the parish and has nothing of his own there. In about 1717, his father took a farm at Whitewalls in Whitfield. He remembered the riding of the boundary of Whitfield about 40 years ago by Mr Utrick Whitfield, eldest son of Mathew Whitfield Esq. Saith ‘he rode a little Galloway and was able to ride through several of the mosses but others he was obliged to lead through and remembers that a great number of horses were laired on that day in endeavouring to get through the mosses’. After he came to farm at Millstones he kept ‘great quantities of sheep and hath frequently had seven or eight score (140/160) of sheep at a time herded and hafted down Simm’s Cleugh and up Thackshaws and Hareshaws on to the Hardrigg and none of them were ever were ever disturbed or molested’….. He remembered that ‘when the Grisley Raw Grove was going on briskly they [the miners] made use of the water which came from the Powstile Well to help to wash their ore and this examinant was a grover there and by means of the said water being carried to the grove, the Powstile people were sometimes in want of water for their cattle and he by the order of old Mathew Ritson and his Wife turned the water of the said well into its old course towards the Powstile ground.’