Cnapan means two things to me. The first and perhaps more important is that it represents an excellent restaurant with rooms in Newport Pembrokeshire. It is a beautifully elegant place, a listed Georgian townhouse on East Street and I love going there. It is so relaxed and comfortable. You are made to feel at home from the moment you walk through the door. The bedrooms are full of character and we sat in ours for a while before our meal on Friday (15 May 2009), watching the wind drive the rain in from the sea. From the window we could see the church looking down on us and Mynydd Carningli behind, drifting in and out of the low cloud.I can recommend Cnapan without reservation and I can definitely suggest the fish stew, whilst Liz would recommend the chicken cooked with puy lentils and chorizo. The wine was good too. Then the weather, which had been wet and miserable all day, unexpectedly lifted. It was suddenly a lovely spring evening and we walked down to Parrog and watched the sunset. It was beautiful. I have added three pictures of Fridays sunset to my page on the website. I really enjoyed it.Here is the Cnapan website. http://www.cnapan.co.ukHowever, Cnapan is also the name of an ancient and vicious game which was popular in medieval and Tudor times. It is an ancestor of rugby apparently. It didnt spread much outside Pembrokeshire and you can understand why. Modern re-creations of the game have not prospered largely because no one will provide insurance cover. When it was revived for a match between Wales and England, the Welsh won easily, as a consequence of not explaining the rules. Not that here are many to be frank.It must have been quite an event, with the game stretching for miles. It was played with a hard wooden ball, rather like a cricket ball. It was perhaps a little larger than a tennis ball. This was the cnapan. The object was to take the ball back home to your own parish church. Simple really.Opposing teams were huge, with hundreds of players. In fact a team was usually the entire male population of a village.There was an annual grudge match between Newport and nearby Nevern. The game would start on the beach Traeth Mawr and the game would rage its way along roads, across fields and through hedges. Players were on foot, although the gentry took part on horseback, armed with staves and cudgels. Their objective was probably to remain fully clothed in order to preserve a little of the dignity appropriate to their position. The others played in only trousers or breeches since any other clothes would be ripped off. It was a good idea to keep your hair and beard short, apparently. You might ask yourself how in such circumstances you could distinguish members of the other side but I dont suppose it mattered that much. Injuries were common as you might expect, and deaths not unusual.There were tactics of a kind. There were positions like backs and forwards, and tacklers. There was passing and marking. But mostly it was fighting.The game usually ended either when darkness intervened or when the players went home because victory for one side seemed inevitable.In the still and peaceful sunset on Friday it was hard to think that this village had once been the home of such mayhem. To be honest, as an outsider who doesnt carry the rugby gene, cnapan doesnt seem a great deal different from its modern-day counterpart. But then what do I know? What I do know is that I have no doubt as to which particular Cnapan I prefer.And we shall be going back.