Tomorrow at around 6 pm there will be a "game" of cnapan on Traeth mawr (Big Beach) in Newport -- staged with the help of around 60 rugby players for a TV documentary featurung Griff Rhys Jones. Griff is following the old pilgrim trail from Aberystwyth to St David's, and is hopping off to look at assorted quirky things along the way. he and the TV producer were quite kaken with the idea that cnapan used to be played on the beach -- so Pete and Ursula Smith have done their best to rustle up a goodly number of beefy individuals to have a go at the game on the sand. We'll try to make the game as authentic as possible -- but I dare say the players will not be too well up on the tactical niceties of the game.
The last time that the game was played on the sands was in the 1990's -- for an S4C programme. before that, we played the game for a decade of so around 1985 - 1995, for an annual "Cnapan Trophy" -- with teams from the parishes of Newport and Nevern competing.
Why is this relevant to angel Mountain? Well, the game features quite prominently in the stories, and of course one of the great tragedies of the saga -- the death of Martha's husband David -- occurs in the middle of a cnapan game on Traeth Mawr.
2 comments:
I found this blog through a rather circuitous route.... but I am very intrigued indeed. My local library has no copies, B & N and Amazon only used... may I still purchase new copies somewhere? I will go with used if I must, here in the US they are tough to find. Thank you.
Hello Kim! I'm not surprised that your library (in the US?) does not have copies of the books -- they do very little, even in the UK, to support small publishers, even when one of them produces a best-seller! "On Angel Mountain" has now sold over 20,000 copies...
The best way to get the books is to go down the Paypal route via my two web sites:
http://www.brianjohn.f2s.com/index.html
http://www.angel-mountain.info/
Hope that either of these will work for you!
Best wishes
Brian
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