The riddle drum is a simple frame drum — goatskin or sheepskin stretched over a wooden hoop, 30 to 48 cm across, with no jingles and no ornamentation — documented in the south of England in the 1950s by folklorist Peter Kennedy under the name “riddle drum,” tied directly to the agricultural process of winnowing grain (called “riddling” in English farming dialect). In Cornwall, the same basic instrument is called the crowdy-crawn, from the Cornish croder croghen, “skin sieve” — documented even earlier, in an 1880 glossary of Cornish dialect, where it’s described as a sieve frame with a sheepskin bottom, used for taking up corn and “sometimes used as a tambourine.”

When not being played, the crowdy-crawn served a second, entirely practical purpose: a catch-all storage container for household odds and ends, which is how “crowdy-crawn” came to mean “miscellaneous junk” in Cornish dialect more broadly. The riddle drum/crowdy-crawn is essentially identical in construction and origin story to the Irish bodhrán — researcher accounts describe Irish, Cornish, and English versions of the same agricultural-tool-turned-instrument, independently surviving in three different regional folk traditions under three different names.