At my table: Dervla Murphy

“You’re only courageous if you do something you’re afraid to do” – solo adventurer Dervla Murphy (1931-2022), considered by many as the greatest female travel writer of all time

You’ve probably been asked before: “if you could sit around a table with five humans, alive or not, who would you invite?” At My Table, a series on extraordinary women, is a response to this question. You’ll find links to other At My Table essays at the end of this piece. Please look here for other travel-focussed stories.

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Dear NE-One

It’s a question often asked but I’ll ask you anyway: if you could invite five people – anyone, from anywhere, and any time – over to dinner, who would they be?

It’s something I often mull over, and one thing I know for sure: Dervla Murphy is top of my list. Wouldn’t you want to have dinner with a woman who, in 1963 at age 32, cycled solo from Dunkirk to Delhi? It was a 7000km journey, on which she took one change of clothing, 12 pens and four rounds of ammunition. She carried a .25 automatic pistol – which she used “on a couple of occasions, and finally sold it in Afghanistan”, she said in this wonderful interview in Banff.