It does say "charge to Bathgate"
Now that is a definite lead.
How it worked was that if you were desperate enough you applied for relief to the parochial board for the parish where you were living. The parochial board would make some pretty detailed enquiries, because if you didn't have 'settlement' in their parish they could get the parish where you did have 'settlement' to reimburse them for whatever they paid out for your relief.
You acquired 'settlement' either by being born in the parish, or having lived there continuously for five years (later reduced to three IIRC). Or by marrying a man with 'settlement' in the parish, but that obviously doesn't apply to John Crawford.
Often several parishes would get together and build a joint poorhouse that was administered by the parochial board of the parsih where it was situated.
So it looks to me as if John Crawford was living in Linlithgow or elsewhere in West Lothian when he became unable to support himself. He was admitted to the poorhouse in Linlithgow at the expense of the Bathgate parochial board, so he must have lived in Bathgate for long enough to have acquired 'settlement'.
The point is that the Bathgate parochial board would have tried their utmost to avoid admitting that he had acquired 'settlement' there, because they would have wanted to avoid paying Linlithgow for him if at all possible. Therefore they would have compiled, and as far as possible checked, a dossier on where he was born, who his parents were, what his religion was, who his dependants were, and where he had lived and for how long at each address.
If they accepted responsibility for him, there should have been not only an Application for Relief, but also a listing in the Register of Poor for Bathgate.
So I recommend that your next move should be to try again to find out if the Bathgate parochial board records of applications for relief and their Register of Poor for the relevant years have survived, and if so get a copy of what those documents say about John Crawford. Don't be put off by an age being wrong - it could be a clerical error, or John himself lying about his age.
It would also be worth investigating whether or not Mary Morrison also applied for relief and is in the Register of Poor for Linlithgow and/or Bathgate, either as Mary Morrison or as Mary Crawford.
