The name Annascaul is from Áth na Scáil, the ford of the hero, where an old road crossed a river named for the warrior. The hero, in local tradition, is Cúchulainn, whose grave is reputed to sit on the side of the mountain at Droumavalla, just north of the village, near a lake called Loch an Scáil. There was an argument in the early twentieth century about whether the name should be read with that meaning or another; Tadhg Kennedy of the Bureau of Military History recalled his grandmother settling it by the way she pronounced the word, knowing the lake's name in her bones. Annascaul itself is a relatively young village by Irish standards, grown up around the new mail coach road from Tralee to Dingle in the early nineteenth century. In 1837 a topographer described it as eleven houses and ninety-two inhabitants in a pleasant valley. The 2022 census counted 291. The valley, and the hero stories, are older than any of them.

Tom Crean was born just outside Annascaul in 1877 and joined the Royal Navy at sixteen. He was already in the South Atlantic when an officer named Robert Falcon Scott asked him to volunteer for the Antarctic, and he said yes three times over a quarter of a century. He sailed with Scott on the Discovery (1901-04) and again on the Terra Nova (1910-13), and when Scott chose his final polar party Crean was one of the men sent back from the plateau, which is why he was alive to make the thirty-five-mile walk for Teddy Evans. Two years later he was on the Endurance with Ernest Shackleton, and when the ice crushed the ship and the expedition fell into its long fight for survival, Crean rowed in the open boat from Elephant Island to South Georgia and then walked over the unmapped mountains of that island to fetch help. He came home to Annascaul, married Nell Herlihy, and in 1927 opened a public house he called the South Pole Inn. He died in 1938, at sixty-one, from a burst appendix. In 2003 the village put up a statue of him opposite the pub. Both are still there.

Crean is the name everyone knows in Annascaul, but he is not the only one. The sculptor Jerome Connor was born here in 1874, three years before Crean, and emigrated to America as a child. Connor went on to create one of the most striking monuments in Washington D.C., the Nuns of the Battlefield, a bronze relief on Rhode Island Avenue commemorating the Catholic sisters who nursed wounded soldiers during the American Civil War. He had a habit, like Crean, of doing impossible things and then going back to ordinary life. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, young men from Annascaul went into the British Royal Navy in numbers, and the village absorbed and lost generations of sailors the way coastal places do. Today Annascaul GAA plays Gaelic football for the parish, Annascaul FC plays soccer, and the Dingle Way walking route threads through on its long looping path around the peninsula.

The South Pole Inn sits low and white at the centre of the village, looking exactly as a working pub in West Kerry should: dark wood inside, peat in the grate, photographs of Crean and his crews on the walls. Outside, on a slab of stone, his statue holds two of the husky puppies from the Terra Nova. Annascaul Lake is two miles north, set in a hard-cut valley, the kind of place that explains, if you stand there long enough, why the man who grew up looking at this water and these hills was unsurprised to find himself in Antarctica. The narrow-gauge Tralee and Dingle Light Railway used to pass through; it closed in 1953. The N86 still runs east to Tralee and west to Dingle, and the R561 turns south toward Inch Strand. The hero in the place name belongs to a story two thousand years older than Crean. The village belongs to both of them.