Author of ‘Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle’ dies aged 90

Dervla Murphy, who has died at the age of 90, was a renowned travel writer who in 1963 left her home in Lismore, Co Waterford, and cycled across Europe and Asia to India.

The resulting book, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle, published in 1965, was a best-seller and set the pattern for the rest of her life. In her book On a Shoestring to Coorg, she brought her four-year-old daughter Rachel along for the ride.

She later travelled through Nepal, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Transylvania, Cuba, the Middle East and other far-flung destinations, describing her adventures in 26 widely-praised travel books, which were written out in longhand before being sent to the publisher.

“Murphy finds humour in situations that most of us would regard as uncomfortable, and her writing bursts with a love of humanity in its myriad manifestations,” says the citation about her in the book Modern Irish Lives.

She always returned to her home, a 17th-century stone-built former cattle shed in the historic town of Lismore, where she lived alone with her books (and without a television), telling a recent visitor she was “addicted to solitude”.

“I never did anything that any ordinary person couldn’t do,” she told an interviewer from the Financial Times, earlier this year. “I’ve done nothing extreme; you might say… I never did anything very daring.”

She took travelling across remote areas of the world in her stride, often alone and in the early days armed with a pistol. She was befriended by ordinary people on her travels, whether she was on a bicycle, mule or some other form of transport, other than the motor car.

The result was a form of travel writing that influenced a new generation of free-spirited travellers in describing real experiences rather than enjoying luxury travel.

Dervla was born in Co Waterford in 1931, where her father, Fergus, was the county librarian. She said her passion for travel was sparked by a present for her 10th birthday of a bicycle and an atlas. She was educated at the Ursuline Convent in Waterford but left school at 14 to spend the next 16 years caring for her aged mother, Kathleen, until her death.

In 1968 she became a single mother. She recalled in a recent interview that her neighbours were very kind and considerate, but were scandalised when she took the baby out in the pram naked, to soak up the sunshine.

Her first expedition to India and her subsequent trips around the world were funded by renting out her house and as she became better known, royalties from her previous books.

She remained a non-conformist, who even in her 90s didn’t believe in “fitting in”. She drank beer, raised her child on her own terms and had no time for what she called the “gross materialism” of the modern era, including the excesses she witnessed in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger era.

She told Jude Webber that she was “always mistaken for a man” because of her deep voice and the way she behaved, which sometimes involved determinedly fending off bandits and thieves.

She also had a deep curiosity, going to see things for herself, whether in Israel or Northern Ireland, which she visited during one of the worst years of the Troubles.

The resulting book, A Place Apart (1972), won the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. She also published a memoir of her childhood, Wheels Within Wheels.

In political terms she described herself as “an ordinary Irish Republican” but on the subject of a United Ireland, hoped the politicians “don’t rush in and mess it up”.

Dervla Murphy is survived by her daughter Rachel and her granddaughters, Rose, Clodagh and Zea. “Her contribution to writing, and to travel writing in particular, had a unique commitment to the value of the human experience in all its diversity,” said President Michael D Higgins, paying tribute.

source: http://www.independent.ie / Independent.ie / Home> Irish News / by Liam Collins / May 24th, 2022