When a wolf in Bulgaria was about to attack her, she killed it with a pistol in Turkey, she wrote, when a “scantily clad” Kurdish intruder bent over her in the moonlight in the hostel room where she was staying, she fired a warning shot into the ceiling and sent him fleeing. She watched two men who were trying to clear a snowdrift fall to their deaths when their plow skidded off a precipice.

She braved subzero cold, blizzards and extreme desert heat on that first trip. Traveling mainly by bicycle but also on foot, by mule and in Jeeps and buses, she spent months at a time in Ethiopia, Peru, Cuba, Israel, Gaza, Madagascar, Nepal, Tibet, Baltistan, South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Romania and Northern Ireland. She became a leading travel writer, a fearless and curious loner who filled her rucksack with pens, a notebook, a light but warm sleeping bag and a change of clothing. In her most celebrated journey, which she described in her first book, “Full Tilt: Ireland to India With a Bicycle” (1965), she rode from Dunkirk, France, through Europe and on to Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Murphy turned her wild imaginings into reality. But giving me material for dreaming about something that I knew could be attained, it offered a healthier outlet for my imaginings than my usual escapist fantasies.” “A 10-year-old’s decision to cycle to India might have seemed to many adults an amusing childish whim. “Now I saw how I could travel in reality - alone, independent and needing very little money,” she wrote in her memoir, “Wheels Within Wheels” (1979). As she rode up a hill near her home that day in Lismore, County Waterford, Ireland, she thought that if she pedaled long enough, she could get to India. For her 10th birthday, Dervla Murphy received a secondhand bicycle and an atlas.

Full tilt bicycle