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I've hesitated to post this, as I have both John and Sarah Bowden in my records but they are very unlikely to be helpful for the Bowden family in Stockport. However, it's something that people interested in Bowden families should be aware of. The name is common, not only in Greater Manchester but also in Devon (especially South Devon) and neighbouring counties with very few occurrences between Somerset and Manchester. However, the equivalence of names is almost certainly coincidental and they arose independently in the two places. Apart from anything else the pronunciation is different: the first syllable rhymes with "low" in Greater Manchester and with "how" in Devon. (Although my own family is from Devon, we pronounce it ahistorically with "low", but that is only because my great-grandmother thought that the "how" pronunciation was "common").

We became aware of Bowdens in Greater Manchester when we lived in Hale between 1954 and 1965. My sister, then called Cornish-Bowden, worked for a while in a solicitor's office in Manchester for a Mr Bowden.

Joanna Southcott (née Hankford), who died in 1546 in Bovey Tracey, was one of my many great^11 grandmothers.

Joanna Southcott (1750 – 1814) was a religious prophetess, also from Devon, near Exeter, and still has followers today.

It's not impossible, of course, that two people with the same name living fairly close to one another should have no connection with one another, the similarity of name and place being just a coincidence. Nonetheless, it is suggestive.

I'm not particularly anxious to find that I'm related to a prophetess, but I haven't found a connection. Does anyone know of the origins of the prophetess?

There is a tendency to assume that official records (or semi-official ones, like parish records) have been competently compiled by well informed and educated people, but often that is not the case, as I discovered when I needed a copy of my father's birth certificate. He was born in 1908 in Sydney, Nova Scotia, so naturally I applied to the appropriate office in Nova Scotia. They told me that they couldn't provide a birth certificate (I don't know why not, as they sent one to my nephew a couple of years later) and offered a photocopy of the relevant page of the birth register. In one short paragraph there were no fewer than four mistakes: my father's second given name was garbled to the point that it was gibberish; my grandfather's birthplace was (trivially) misspelt; his occupation was completely wrong; and I don't remember what the fourth was.

I have

Sarah de Carminow formerly Hornacote
Born about 1207 in Tintagel, Cornwall, Englandmap [uncertain]
ANCESTORS ancestors
Daughter of Gervais Hornacote and Unknown (Unknown) Hornacote
[sibling(s) unknown]
Wife of Roger Carminow — married 1239 in Tingtagel,,Cornwall,Englandmap
DESCENDANTS descendants
Mother of Roger Carminow
Died 1302 at about age 95 in Cornwall

Sources
↑ A source for this information is needed.

The dates don't rally agree with your question.

The information comes from https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Hornacote-1

I don't know how reliable it is.

There were probably many cases like this, most of them unlikely to be easy to find on the net. The one that I remember (also from the 1970s) concerned Ashton-under-Lyne, in Greater Manchester, a very different place. I can't find confirmation of that. More generally, I have read that the invention of the bicycle made the largest single contribution to the decrease in in-breeding in rural England.