Anyone wanting to follow in the footsteps of Sir Ernest Shackleton's most trusted companion could, of course, head for the South Pole, spend a winter marooned on pack ice, row 800 miles across open sea in a tiny boat, and then climb 26 miles over the unmapped mountains of South Georgia in a non-stop, 38-hour forced march.
That, or head for Kerry and have a pint at the South Pole Inn in Annascaul.
Annascaul is a small, muddy village, halfway between the county town of Tralee and the bright lights of smart Dingle. The name alone has always made the pub an oddity in a country of pubs called Murphy's or Ryan's, or occasionally, in a fit of poetic excess, PJ McCarthy Best Drinks.
As we drove past 40-odd years ago, my father shouted to his backseat audience the story of Tom Crean, the man who went to the Antarctic three times - and lived to tell the tale, unlike his expedition leaders Shackleton and Scott. I went in years later, when hitching down the same road.
The South Pole, which Crean built out of his navy pension and prize money, and ran until his death in 1938, was a miserable pub then. It has now been transformed by a new owner, Tom Kennedy - no relation of mine but a distant cousin of Tom Crean's, like half the village - reinvented as a convincing stage set of a traditional Irish pub.
An infant heritage industry is congealing around the memory of the county's least sung hero, as the village, now smartly painted from end to end, cashes in on the tourism gold mine literally on its doorstep. A consortium of villagers bought a Christmas pudding bag which went to the South Pole tucked into the toe of Ernest Shackleton's sock, at a Christie's auction for almost £5,000, as the kernel of a putative Tom Crean Visitor Centre. The relic hung until a few weeks ago on the parlour wall of the Anchor guest house (prop Marie Kennedy, distant relation of Tom Crean's). Now it's gone to Kerry County Museum in Tralee, where the first major exhibition on Crean opens this spring.
Tom Crean is about to become big business: he is never far from Shackleton's elbow in Charles Sturridge's epic two-part film, to be screened on Channel 4 over the New Year. He features in the film now showing at the London IMAX, and in South - the exhibition at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich. There is a biography, a flurry of books, and some time next year the Russell Crowe Hollywood version is due.
For once, the story is worth the hype. In 1893 Tom Crean, a wiry, dark man walked out of the ring of mountains, down to the nearest recruiting station, and joined the Royal Navy. He didn't even come from Annascaul, but from Gortacurraun, a townsland up the hill which makes Annascaul look like downtown Manhattan. In 1901 he volunteered to join an under-planned, under-financed expedition to Antarctica, under an idealistic, squeamish, slightly neurotic officer called Robert Falcon Scott - together with a charming young Irish lieutenant borrowed from the merchant navy, one Ernest Shackleton. It was the first of Scott's heroic disasters.
Crean was cherished not only for his strength and stamina, but for his cheerfulness. He was automatically included in the Terra Nova expedition, which killed Scott and his polar party after Amundsen beat them to the pole. He was decorated for an extraordinary exploit, when he and another man dragged their dying officer, Lieutenant Lashly, for six weeks across the ice, ending in Crean's 36-mile, 18-hour solitary trek back to base camp and help.
His third Antarctic journey, with Shackleton on the Endurance, sparked the current rash of films and books. Crean was one of the eight who made the astounding 800-mile journey to South Georgia from Elephant Island, where most of the party was left for five months, and one of the three who made the final incredible climb across the unmapped mountains.
Crean's afterlife in Annascaul was as haunting as the rest of the story. There is a folklore on Cyprus about Lazarus, raised from the dead by Christ, unable to settle again among the living. There is something of that quality about Crean's last 18 years. The orthodox version is of a modest man, settled quietly in his pub, never speaking again of his travels. It doesn't take much digging in the village to discover another truth. There are dozens of villagers who remember Crean, and hundreds of young people whose parents knew him well. Crean married Nell, who ran the pub and terrorised her husband and the village, and clearly did not like to be reminded of his previous incarnation.
At Kerry County Museum, curator Helen O'Carroll is uncovering fascinating evidence in the family archive of Shackleton's attempts to persuade him to join his own final expedition, where he died of a heart attack. Crean never spoke in the pub, but villagers remember his regular, sometimes daily visits to their houses, and the stories he told there. He bought sweets for the children coming home from school: the children were bored with the stories, and terrified by one glimpse of his blackened frost bitten feet as he paddled in the stream beside the pub.
The real story of what Tom Crean did in his final years is to be found up the narrow road into the mountains above the village, where anyone local will point you towards the small graveyard at Ballynacourty.
The graveyard slopes steeply, part bog and mostly rock, so that almost all the burials are in concrete tombs built above ground, crowded as close together as village houses. The man who went to the end of the earth three times chose the lowest corner of the cemetery, overlooking a sweep of mountains, and a field so rough and hard to work its local name is Siberia. There he built his own tomb, a great plain concrete box, working on it for part of most days for years, and there he - and years later Nell - were buried. There is no sign on the graveyard gate, and nothing except the bare names and dates on the plaque on the grave itself.
One day there will undoubtedly be an audiovisual, a statue, an interpretive centre. For now there is just a small village in stunning landscape, and a treasury of living sources for a remarkable story.
Way to go
Getting there: Ryanair (ryanair.com, 0870 1569569) flies to Kerry International, at Farranfore, from £14.49 one way not inc taxes.
Where to stay: Tralee abounds in hotels, as does Dingle, and Annascaul has several bed and breakfasts, including the immaculate Anchor (00 353 66 915 7382), where Marie Kennedy is an expert on the Crean story.
Where to eat: Many pubs in the village do food, and the South Pole Inn does meals from noon until 9pm.
More information: The Tom Crean story, and a wealth of local information, is in The Small Book of Annascaul, published by the Annascaul Tourist Association: details from annascaul@indigo.ie. Killarney tourist information: 00 353 6431633.
Flight time to Kerry: 1hr 20 mins.
Country code: 00 353
Time difference: 0 hours.
£1 = 1.21 punts.
Shackleton is showing in two parts January 2 and 3, Channel 4 at 9pm.
