Crowdy-crawn: England musical instrument

A crowdy-crawn is a wooden hoop that is covered with sheepskin. The instrument is used as a percussion musical instrument in the western Cornwall at least as early as the year 1880. It is analogous to the Irish bodhran. The musical instrument is used by some modern Cornish traditional music ensembles as a solo instrument or accompaniment instrument. The name of the instrument is derived from the Cornish ‘croder croghen’ which literary means ‘skin sieve’.

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The crowdy-crawn is opined to have originated from a tool used for gathering or measuring grains. According to one authoritative observer on the musical instrument, the Irish bodhran was derived from the riddle, an agricultural tool that was used for shifting coarse material from harvested grain; ‘most were made out of the sieves and the riddles, you know from riddling the corn, they just rtemoved the wire and made use of the frame’. As a riddle drum, the musical instrument is also known from Wiltshire and Dorsetshire in England. A book of English agricultural hand tools portrays a riddle with a beech frame 28 inches

 in diameter from Leicestershire in England. Scotsman Osgood Mackenzie opined that he ‘never saw a wire riddle for riddling meal or corn in the ancient days, they all were produced of stretched skins of sheep with holes bored in them by a big red-hot needle’, suggesting a cosmopolitan origin for the musical instrument.

The musical instrument is used to store odds and ends in homes when they are not being used in the field. The name of the instrument is also used contemporarily to describe a gathering of people for Cornish cultural storytelling, lace-making, quilting, spinning and some other traditional events.