Britain keeps a Red List for its crafts, built on the model used for animals. Least concern, endangered, critically endangered, extinct. The 2025 edition assessed 285 trades: ninety-three endangered, seventy-two critically so, five extinct. It is a register of loss, compiled by people who expected to be writing obituaries.
In the first edition, in 2017, one line under extinct read: sieve and riddle making. Mike Turnock, the last professional in the country, had retired in 2010 and closed the door behind him. A trade that may go back to Roman Britain, and that in 1946 supported hundreds of firms, had ended with one man's pension.
Sorting what you want from what you do not
“Sieves and riddles are tools that are an ancient form of sorting what you do want from what you don't,” says Steve Overthrow, who now makes them. The distinction between the two is precise, and worth having: “A sieve has a pre-made mesh trapped between two pieces of wood, and a riddle is completely woven by hand, wire by wire.”
Making one is a negotiation with green timber. Strips are steamed for three hours, bent around a cylinder, left two or three days to decide whether they will hold their curve. The ends are chamfered and tacked, holes drilled, galvanised wire drawn tight and woven across the hoop. Oak, elm and beech traditionally; ash in Overthrow's workshop, since straight-grained beech is now almost impossible to buy — nobody outside this one trade wants it.
A week before the redundancy
In June 2017 Overthrow was eight years into restoring 1920s and 1930s cars on a Somerset farm, and one week away from being made redundant. A Heritage Crafts newsletter arrived announcing that sieve and riddle making was extinct. He spent about four hours reading everything he could find, and then set out to disprove the entry.
He found Mike Turnock, and the last maker taught the next one the things no archive holds. It went badly for a long time: thirty-one hoops snapped before numbers thirty-two to thirty-nine came out whole — those went to the BBC. On mass-produced competition he is unbothered: “When you have bought your sixth one in twelve years come back and see me.” And on the future: “I will still be doing it without doubt in 50 years' time. This is a lifetime commitment now.”
The second reviver came from the opposite direction. Colin Davies is a cockle fisherman who saw a television report about the Red List and began making commercially. His trade already knew the object intimately: on the Welsh cockle beds, until the 1970s, it was women who went out with hand-rakes and riddles and donkey carts, sifting sand for a living. He had spent his working life using the tool; now he makes it.
The register that raised the dead
Here is what nobody designing the Red List can have planned. The point of an inventory of dying skills is to record the moment they stop — the same melancholy service the conservation lists perform for species. Instead, the notice of death functioned as a summons. Print that something no longer exists and, occasionally, somebody takes it personally.
Overthrow has now stopped taking orders. He is training a successor instead, which is the only sensible use of his time: the official count for the craft stands at zero full-time professionals, one part-time, one trainee. He also mentions, without ceremony, that his sons — three, and nearly two — already stand at the workbench.
A riddle separates what is worth keeping from what is not. That is its entire function, whether the material is grain, gravel, sand or cockles. It is a fitting instrument for this story: a list built to sort the surviving crafts from the lost ones passed one of them through the mesh, and the thing that went through turned out to be still alive. The hand remains visible — one pair of them, plus a trainee, plus two boys who are too small to know what they are inheriting.