Ancient Herat is “a city of absolute enchantment”, she compares the bounteous Ghorband valley to the Garden of Eden, and is moved by the “incredible, unforgettable beauty” of the mountains of the Hindu Kush. Such was her love for the country, she describes herself as “rabidly and irreparably ‘Afghanatical’” by the end of her time there in 1964. I am not going out to overcome something, like an explorer or serious mountaineer. What comes across in the writing is the “sheer bliss” and utter exhilaration that travel can engender in her.

To that end, Murphy says some of her most memorable experiences have been in Afghanistan, Peru and Siberia, places in which, despite the harshest of environments, she often seems to find intense happiness, even peace. “Even a brief glimpse of what we were is valuable to help understand what we are,” she writes in Full Tilt. She seems to seek out the cut-off and inaccessible, to try to time-travel to a past that to her feels more vital and honest. But still, she has crossed many bridges – mostly by cycle or on foot, mostly on her own, and mostly in the more remote and inhospitable parts of the world. “I never cross my bridges till I come to them,” she says. “I thank God for my sanguine temperament, which refuses to allow me to believe in disaster until it is finally manifest,” she wrote in Full Tilt, the story of her solo journey by bicycle from Ireland to India in 1963. Murphy, now 86, is being characteristically modest and she similarly dismisses any romantic notion of her being brave or courageous. But I am not going out to overcome something, like an explorer or serious mountaineer. “Clearly there have been discomforts and extremes of temperature – though not a great deal. “Well, I don’t terribly like that word in relation to my sort of travelling – it’s not anything to do with it,” she says, politely but firmly, in her low-pitched drawl, when I suggest that her pioneering trips must have presented challenges along the way. She gives you a firm handshake, looks you in the eye – and you just hope you pass muster. You get the feeling that over the course of 50-plus years of trailblazing and 26 intrepid travel books, she has got used to quickly gauging the temper of a place, and of people. “Interviewing Dervla is like trying to open an oyster with a wet bus ticket,” her mentor and first publisher, Jock Murray, once said.

Dervla Murphy, in India, on the journey that led to her writing Full Tilt: Ireland to India With a Bicycle (1965)

Full Tilt by Dervla Murphy