She relied on making local connections, and despite being attacked by wolves in Bulgaria, robbed in Siberia and threatened by soldiers in Ethiopia, she maintained that her worst incident occurred at home, when she shattered an arm after tripping over her cats. It sends such a message to people that you really do trust them.”ĭervla was a light packer (her preference for travel by bike, mule or on foot forced the issue, and she never learned to drive), and her essential items included a volume of poetry, a big pack of aspirin and an indefatigable curiosity. “It makes getting to know people so much simpler. “You are much more likely to make friends with people if you arrive alone on a bicycle,” she said in interview in The Times in November 2020. She was resolute about bringing Rachel up alone, and her daughter would sometimes be her sole travel companion, although she often tended to set off on her own. In 1963, once Dervla’s mother had died, she set off by bike for India, as she’d long promised herself, returning home a year later to write her first book, Full Tilt (see below).ĭervla had one daughter, Rachel, with Terence de Vere White, the then-married literary editor of The Irish Times. Continental trips followed - sporadic breaks during a 16-year stint nursing her invalid mother. She received a second-hand bicycle and an atlas on her 10th birthday and resolved that she’d one day cycle to India. Her first trip away from Ireland, at the age of 20, saw her biking through England and Wales writing a series of articles for Hibernia magazine.

Born in Lismore, County Waterford in 1931, Dervla forged her way out into the world on two wheels.

A straight-talking woman of passionate convictions, Dervla Murphy was a travel writer who loved a local beer, hated cruise liners (“I’d pay £10,000 not to set foot on a cruise ship”) and saw mass tourism as a “disaster”.

Full tilt book dervla murphy