Dervla Murphy—Ireland’s Greatest Travel Writer

By John Greeves

to a collection of 9000 before Dervla died in 2022.

In 1963, Dervla set off by bike for India, as she’d long promised herself, returning home a year later when she wrote her first book, Full Tilt. She went armed with a .25 pistol, confronted wolves and thieves but continued on her six month journey. Her route on her Armstrong Cadet men’s bicycle (named Rozinante after Don Quixote’s steed and shortened to Roz) took her through Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. She endured blizzards, heat waves, an attempted rape, scorpion bite, sickness, three broken ribs and travelled on a meagre budget of £64. In Pakistan, she visited Swat, where she was guest of the last wali, Miangul and visited the mountain area of Gilgit.

On her tenth birthday, Dervla Murphy was given a second-hand bicycle by her parents and an atlas from her grandfather. As she puts it, “Already I was an enthusiastic cyclist, though I had never owned a bicycle, and soon after my birthday, I resolved to cycle to India one day. I have never forgotten the exact spot, on a steep hill near Lismore, where this decision was made.” Her parents moved from Dublin to Lismore in Waterford when her father, Fergus Murphy was appointed as county librarian. Shortly after Dervla’s birth (28 November 1931), Kathleen contracted crippling rheumatoid arthritis. By age 14, Dervla was withdrawn from Ursuline convent boarding school in Waterford to become Kathleen’s carer for the next 16 years. Continental trips by bicycle followed with sporadic breaks during this long stint of nursing her invalid mother. Her father died in 1961 and her mother in the following year, leaving her with a house full of books that grew

Right from the start, Dervla showed an unwavering tolerance to hardship, accepting it as part of the traveller’s lot. During her fifty years of travelling to remote locations, she sustained amoebic dysentery in Pakistan, brucellosis in India, gout and hepatitis in Madagascar and tick bite fever in South Africa.

To her, writing was not a career but a necessity. Her first book Full Tilt, was based on diaries and the opportunity for publication, only came about because of a chance meeting in Delhi with Penelope Chetwode, John Betjeman’s wife. Looking back on her fledgling travel writing career she said, “I started 50 years ago from scratch, with no private income, nothing, and managed to make a living from it. I doubt if any youngster now could do that...it’s changed so much that it would not be possible.”

In all Dervla published 26 travel books which took her to 30 countries. After her first book, Tibetan Foothold (1966) and the Waiting Land (1967), emerged from her work with Tibetan refugees in India and Nepal. A year later, Dervla made her first trip to Africa. She travelled to Ethiopia and walked with a pack mule from Asmara to Addis Ababa, confronted by Kalashnikov carrying soldiers described in her fourth book, In Ethiopia with a Mule.

The rural poverty she encountered on her global travels was no surprise to her, having attended a village primary school with barefoot, hungry children and where tuberculosis was still be found in the community. Dervla normally travelled alone, without luxuries and frequently accepted the hospitality of local people. She had a great capacity for life, approaching each day, person and place with open arms. She arrived at each destination often without social introduction and showed a genuine interest in the people she met and talked to on her travels.

In an interview in 2018, she told me, “My earlier books were about comparatively unspoilt isolated places, where you could walk for instance in the Andes without coming on a single town. I suppose my main ambition was to simply convey to the reader my excitement for the landscape and the people.”

The only period of her life after her mother died when she didn’t travel was after her daughter’s birth. Rachel was born in unconventional circumstance, her father was Terence de Vere White, literary editor, then of the Irish Times who was married at the time. The father’s name was never revealed until he died. Dervla chose to bring up her daughter on her own, disregarding any opposing opinions of the day. She put travelling on hold for several years when Rachel was very small. For five years she wrote book reviews, as well as making notes about her own life. They were published in 1979 as her autobiography, Wheels Within Wheels. Book reviews were something she disliked writing but it provided an income. “I did a lot of book reviewing mainly for the Irish Times, but occasionally for the TLS (Times Literary Supplement). I gave up years ago because they wanted shorter and shorter reviews” and as Dervla admitted, she never had a passion for writing the shorter piece, which was “completely different to writing a book.”

When Rachel was older she travelled with her mother to other parts of the world. She had her fifth birthday in Kodagu (then called Coorg) in South West India. Later, mother and daughter travelled to Baltistan, Peru, Madagascar (aged14) and Cameroon (aged18) until people began to regard Rachel as an adult.

“Travelling with a small child is a huge advantage,” Dervla said, and in another interview added “A child’s presence emphasises your trust in the community’s goodwill. And because children pay little attention to racial or cultural differences, junior companions rapidly demolish barriers of shyness or apprehension often raised when foreigners unexpectedly approach a remote village,”

Dervla believed that even two adults travelling together can be too many, because local people assume you can depend on one another, whereas, if a solitary traveller turns up, he or she becomes totally dependent and trusting on the local people. Dervla, did break her golden rule once when visiting Cuba in 2005 where she travelled with her daughter, Rachel and her three grandchildren. Two solo trips to Cuba followed in 2006 and 2007 before The Island that Dared: Journeys in Cuba was published. Dervla continued to travel and write into her early 80s. A hip replacement after a fall in Jerusalem in her later years confined Dervla to her austere surroundings in Lismore, a remnant of a 17th century cattle market. It wasn’t a single structure, as we know it, but a range of outbuildings set aside for various uses across a yard. This domestic arrangement never worried Dervla as she crossed outside from the kitchen to another room.

Dervla was a woman of simple and ascetic taste. She never learned to drive. She had no television, washing machine and of course no mobile phone, the only exception being in Gaza where there were no land line phones. She had a set routine, getting up in the morning at 5am and eating a substantial breakfast of homemade muesli, bread and cheese, sometimes eggs, but nothing else for the rest of the day and going to bed at 9.30 pm. She always felt modern communications were narrowing not widening the world and that they had a negative impact on people’s life. In Jaffa, she remembered staying in a very cheap backpacker’s hostel with all different age groups. In days before modern technology came about, everybody would have exchanged experiences, addresses and advice, instead what she found was nobody talked to their fellow travellers. She described the voiceless, asocial scene as such: “There were a half a dozen computers and people came in in the evenings, they put down their luggage went straight to the computers and communicated to whoever was at the other end.”

Dervla was certainly a woman of strong opinions. She chose not to marry, avoided hotels at all costs and decried the arrival of motorways to remote areas under the banner of progress. She was kind, warm and never considering herself brave or special. She was self-effacing; to help a driver recognise her at Cairo airport she described herself as an “Old white haired woman, semi-toothless, slightly stooped, wearing black slacks and T-shirt with hand luggage only.

All her earlier books were quite different and were based on her daily journal she wrote religiously no matter how tired she was feeling. When she arrived back in Lismore she simply expanded her journal writing into “readable English” and added whatever historical or social information was necessary. Everything was hand written then typed out on her typewriter.

In later years she did acquire a computer for emails which was kept safely away from her study. As to her change as a writer over the 50 years of travel she said: “I don’t think I’ve fundamentally changed as a personality. I’ve become more of an activist and the books have changed, so in that sense I’ve changed.” She was critical of Nato, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organisation. She spoke out against nuclear power and climate change. She recognised the intrinsic worth of fragile cultures and traditional ways of life on her many travels and questioned the validity of modern progress and

Her Most Popular Books include:

Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

Eight Feet in the Andes: Travels with a Donkey from Ecuador to Cuzco

South from the Limpopo

The Waiting Land

The Ukimwi Road

Transylvania and Beyond: A Travelling

Wheels within Wheels

On a Shoestring to Coorg: A Travel Memoir of India

Muddling through in Madagascar

In Ethiopia with a Mule.

Roz: A well-travelled bicycle.

This is Roz, or Rozinante, the faithful bicycle used by Dervla Murphy for many of her travel adventures. The bike was bought in Dungarvan on January 14th, 1961, and was put to serious service a year later when Dervla began her journey from Dunkirk to Delhi. This would result in the publication of “Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a bicycle” in 1965, the first book by the Lismore born travel writer.

Other books followed, including “Tibetan Foothold, again with Roz; “The Waiting Land: A spell in Nepal”, now with Leo, a brother to Roz! “On a shoestring to Coorg”, this time with the writer bringing her five-year-old daughter Rachel along. With more that 20 titles to her credit, Dervla retired to her hometown of Lismore where she lived quietly until her death on May 22nd 2022.

Dervla donated Roz to Lismore Library and Waterford Council is delighted to have it on display where it will remain and may serve to inspire people with curiosity about foreign places and a yearning for adventure.

John Greeves originally hails from Lincolnshire. He believes in the power of poetry and writing to change people’s lives and the need for language to move and connect people to the modern world. Since retiring from Cardiff University, Greeves works as a freelance journalist who's interested in an eclectic range of topics.