Qualla: Annascaul

Annascaul: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Tom Crean walked thirty-five miles alone across the Ross Ice Shelf to save another man's life. He was a six-foot-tall sailor from Annascaul, a village of three hundred or so people on the road from Tralee to Dingle, and in February 1912 he set out from a small tent on the Antarctic plateau with three biscuits and a stick of chocolate in his pocket. The two men he left behind were too weak to walk. Eighteen hours later, having crossed open glacier in temperatures cold enough to crack his nails, he reached the base camp at Hut Point and collapsed inside the door. The lieutenant he was trying to save, Teddy Evans, lived another sixty-five years. The village Crean came home to is still here, and the pub he opened when he stopped going to Antarctica is still serving.

Read more: Annascaul on Qualla

Annascaul: The River of the Hero

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ca...

Read more: Annascaul on Qualla

Annascaul: Tom Crean, Three Expeditions and a Long Walk Home

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

Read more: Annascaul on Qualla

Annascaul: Nuns of the Battlefield, and a Quiet Village

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Read more: Annascaul on Qualla

Annascaul: Walking Down the Main Street

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Read more: Annascaul on Qualla