Travelling a different path

BEFORE intrepid travel writer Dervla Murphy was born, her mother met a Romany woman in England who predicted that she would marry a small, slim, dark man and would live among trees and endure a long illness.

She was told she would only have one child, a daughter, who would be famous.

In her disarmingly frank autobiography, Wheels Within Wheels, published in 1979, Murphy writes that she never wanted to be famous but hoped that the fortune teller’s “blanket term covered authorship”.