Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig cromely.org. NS
Answer
cromely.org. 5 NS ns-174.awsdns-21.com.
cromely.org. 5 NS ns-1769.awsdns-29.co.uk.
cromely.org. 5 NS ns-1535.awsdns-63.org.
cromely.org. 5 NS ns-1288.awsdns-33.org.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0