'You can do it - and keep it simple': The life and legacy of travel writer Dervla Murphy

A selection of the work of the renowned travel writer is about to be published by her friend, Ethel Crowley. It’s a riveting account of an exceptional adventurer, writes Aoife Barry

Author Dervla Murphy at her home in Lismore, Co, Waterford, in 2014. Pic: Denis Scannell

When the groundbreaking Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy died last year at the age of 90, the Waterford native left an incredible legacy. 

Now a new book edited by her friend and fellow writer Ethel Crowley brings together a selection of her best work and cements her place in the travel writing pantheon.

As Cork City-based Crowley writes in her introduction to Life At Full Tilt: The Selected Writings of Dervla Murphy, Murphy was an only child born in Lismore, Co Waterford, in 1931. 

Although she longed to travel, her mother suffered from a serious illness and Dervla was needed at home.

When she lost both parents at the very beginning of her 30s, she was suddenly free to live her own life. 

Though it must have been shocking to suffer the losses so close together, she was able to make good on a promise she made to herself at age 10: that she would cycle to India. 

That trip led to her first book, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (1965).

When you get to the part of Full Tilt where she is attacked by wolves and has to whip out a revolver to defend herself, you realise you’re not dealing with any ordinary traveller. 

At a time when women in Ireland were faced with countless social and religious constraints, Murphy was, as Crowley writes, a maverick.

Dervla Murphy, at her kitchen table in Lismore, Co Waterford

After her journey to India, she wrote over 20 books about travelling in countries including Nepal, Laos, Cameroon, Cuba and Transylvania in Romania and Hungary. 

Her final book was published in 2015. Not only did she travel to some of the world’s most remote places, she usually did it by bicycle too.

The collection includes extracts from some of Murphy’s well-known books, such as her memoir Wheels Within Wheels (1979), and travel books On A Shoestring to Coorg (1976), and A Month By the Sea: Encounters in Gaza (2013). 

However, it also covers some of her lesser-known works, such as Race to the Finish? The Nuclear Stakes (1981) and Through the Embers of Chaos: Balkan Journeys (2002).

Crowley, who is a sociologist, wrote a section on Dervla Murphy in her own book Your Place or Mine? in 2013. 

She sent the book to Murphy along with contact details. Not long after that, the phone rang at Crowley’s home. It was Dervla Murphy. 

She liked the ideas in Crowley’s book and invited her to visit her in Lismore. “We clicked on that phone call. It was like love before first sight, almost,” says Crowley. “We had so much in common, we had a lot of ideas in common.” 

Dervla Murphy: a maverick writer at a restrictive time for women in Ireland

Crowley and her husband Jim McLaughlin (a lecturer in political geography) are also big travellers, and weren’t long back from Nicaragua when they first met Murphy.

They got to meet friends and family of Murphy’s in Lismore, as well as her daughter Rachel. “She would call up and say, ‘Now, I’ve got such and such visiting from Palestine, would you like to come over?’” smiles Crowley. 

“It was like the traditional idea of the salon. These were like her salons and it was an absolute privilege to be part of them.” 

On their visits there would be freshly baked spelt bread to eat with homemade soup, as “everything was highly local and ecological”, says Crowley.

Murphy and Crowley were both animal lovers, and would usually chat with an ageing terrier on each of their laps. 

“Moments like that stay with you forever, really. It’s a big lesson in living in the moment. You’re in a situation like that and you think, ‘Okay, you must not forget this, it’s precious’.”

When Crowley asked Murphy about the possibility of putting a collection together, at first Murphy didn’t think there would be any interest in it. 

“She hated going back over old stuff. She hated looking back,” says Crowley. “What convinced her of the public interest was the article I did for the Irish Examiner for her 90th birthday.”

Crowley was also able to tell Murphy about the “phenomenal love” she encountered for her on Twitter/X after the article was published. 

This led Murphy to talk to her publisher Eland, and her daughter Rachel, and Crowley started work on the collection in April last year. 

Crowley passed any royalties from the book to the Murphys, who decided to donate the money to charity.

Travel writer Dervla Murphy at her home in Lismore, Co Waterford. Pic: Dan Linehan

Murphy was always moving forward, says Crowley. “There was a sense of lost time. And I think that stayed with her throughout her life, it’s like, ‘oh my God, there’s no time for all this, just get on with it and do the next [book]’. And there was an insatiable curiosity in her. Her favourite word was ‘fascinating’. So the last thing she would want to do [was] talk about the book she had just finished. And no ego whatsoever, ‘God’s sake, why would anyone want to talk to me?’”

There are many standout stories here. “Some of the things she encountered, [she] would just report them as if they were normal. We’re pretty good [in Ireland] on death and funerals, but this one was out there: in Madagascar, they have an annual corpse-turning festival. They take the body out of the ground and turn them around,” says Crowley. “And she would report that as if it was the most normal thing in the world, like an anthropologist would.”

As her career progressed, Murphy found herself being drawn to visiting certain locations so that she could examine things such as conflict and race relations. 

For her book Tales From Two Cities, she spent three months each in an Asian area in Bradford, England, and in a black area in Birmingham, says Crowley. 

She also wrote about South Africa, the Aids crisis and post-conflict countries. “She had just amazing conversations that no Westerner had. And it was her empathy with people, her ability to walk a mile in their shoes,” says Crowley.

Murphy also had a profound concern about injustice and inequality, says Crowley.

“She would say: ‘Look, we’re all born equal, why is the world like this? What is the experience of different groups of people? What can I learn by speaking to someone who lives on a kibbutz in Israel? How can I understand the life of a fisherman in Gaza who is shot at by the Israeli army every day when he goes to work?’”

Dervla Murphy, on her trusty bike

Murphy was also an example of what we would now call ‘positive ageing’. For her 60th birthday in 1991, she bought a new bike (“she called it the Rolls Royce of bicycles”) and headed off to southern Africa with it. 

Right up until close to the end, she was always writing, says Crowley, and always reading and learning.

Would Crowley ever write a biography of Murphy? She says no. “She put out there already everything that she wanted out there. And there’s nothing I can add to that.” 

What is Murphy’s legacy when it comes to travelling? “I think the main legacy is, you can do it. And keep it simple. You don’t need a whole bunch of stuff. She had a lovely list of rules of travel. The first one was ‘mug up on history’, read your damn books before you go, as much as possible. “Another one of her rules was to find out where people are going, and then go in the opposite direction,” laughs Crowley.

Crowley first encountered Murphy’s work as a teenager, and was immediately entranced. “I felt then, and I still feel now, that to open a new Murphy book was like taking a breath of cold, fresh air and strapping on your backpack and heading out into the world, even though you’re lying on your bed reading it,” she says.

“For me to be the one producing this edited collection, it’s like a full-circle experience. All the stars were aligned. And I’m just so honoured to be the one to produce this collection.” She learned a lot from her friend about living.

“Life is about filling it with interesting stuff. And if knowing Dervla Murphy gave me one lesson it was: make your damn life as interesting as you can, because you only get one. Anything can happen at any time.”

Dervla did not live to see the publication of the book, as she died in May last year. “Her body is dead. But her spirit lives on. And that sounds like a cliché, but I really mean it,” says Crowley. “My goal in producing this book was to make that spirit live on longer, and to keep her memory alive.”

• Life at Full Tilt: The Selected Writings of Dervla Murphy, edited by Ethel Crowley and published by Eland, will be launched in Waterstones, Cork on 1 November at 6.30pm.