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.
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.
The bicycle, however, she continued to use for another 30 years. It was an Armstrong Cadet, which had been converted to single-speed because, Dervla admitted, she couldn’t mend a puncture, let alone fiddle with derailleur gears.
That Ireland-to-India journey was a dream she’d had since age 10 when Dervla, the daughter of a librarian, was given a bicycle and an atlas for her birthday. She subsequently spent her entire adult life as a (usually) solo adventurer, writing 26 books (entirely by hand) that “with their unadorned, direct style of narration were astonishing testimonies of travels to places most people will never go.” [Jude Webber, FT]
The Irish adventurer, traveller and writer – often celebrated as the greatest female travel writer of all time – passed away this weekend at the age of 90. Through her books and stories of places like Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Israel, Gaza, Nepal, Peru and Cuba she has inspired thousands upon thousands of travellers (and writers), and those who spent time with her tell stories of a salt-of-the-earth yet wonderfully eccentric woman who lived life very boldly and on her own terms.
“She travelled like nobody I knew,” wrote Rosita Boland (who interviewed Dervla twice) in the Irish Times yesterday, “[travelling] by mule, and bicycle, and walking, with few plans, and staying where she could, and eating what she found.”
Jude Webber, in an extraordinary piece written for the Financial Times earlier this year, described Dervla as “tall, with no-nonsense short grey hair, the top of her back painfully humped from rheumatoid arthritis, a tooth missing and wearing a darned jumper […] Like all people who are brave, she never saw herself as such. She couldn’t be brave, she told me, because she simply wasn’t afraid of anything. But she was in fact tremendously brave.”
Dervla once said she wasn’t afraid of dying because she doesn’t believe in an afterlife. Quite selfishly, I hope she was spectacularly wrong – and that one day, in some other time and dimension, we will sit together at the kitchen table of her home (which was once a cattle market) and the greatest female travel writer of all time will tell me her stories. Here’s to you, Dervla Murphy – and, thank you.
With love,
Narina
More on Dervla Murphy:
If you have 30 minutes, this here is an brilliant interview to watch; and if you have an hour (and don’t mind paying $6), then the award-winning documentary Who Is Dervla Murphy? is one you won’t want to miss.
Dervla Murphy’s books include Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (available on Audible); Eight Feet in the Andes: Travels with a Mule in Unknown Peru; Ethiopia with a Mule; and South from the Limpopo.
Other At My Table essays include:
Apo Whang-Od: The 106-year-old woman who speaks the language of skin
Venerable Dhammananda Bhikkuni: Thailand’s “rebel monk” and change-maker
Agafia Lykova: The 79-year-old woman who lives alone in the SIberian wilderness
Looking for details on Bali or other travel-related stories?
Please head to the NE Where homepage – or, scroll through the archive, here.
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