Travel-writing has almost become too trendy. For every new work of classic or near-classic quality, scores of others are merely hastily-written, superficial, overly personalised accounts thrown together to either avail of topicality or to appease publishers waiting for another book - any book. From her very first book, Full Tilt, which was published in 1965, Dervla Murphy has approached her craft with diligence, determination, the minimum of fuss and workmanlike, unpretentious prose. The formula is simple: she crosses the chosen landscape by bike, on foot, or on pack pony and speaks with the people. Most importantly, she listens, observes and records. Her new book, South From The Limpopo, describes her experiences of South Africa before, during and after the transfer of power in 1994.
It is a book of contradictions. Murphy chronicles the cultural confusions, the bombast, the breathtaking cruelty and the fear - particularly the fear of the Afrikaner elite as it faced the reality that history had finally caught up with it. It was, she says, the most emotionally demanding book she has written. "South Africa left me confused. When I ended the book I couldn't see any solution to the situation there," she explains. There is hope now, she says, but - never one to offer empty platitudes - adds "but I'm only very slightly hopeful".
The winding road through the Knockmealdown Mountains to the Blackwater Valley to Lismore, Co Waterford, where St Carthage founded his cathedral in the 7th century, was empty last Saturday. Only a couple of cars appeared. Much of the world seemed to be watching the funeral of Princess Diana: the people in Cahir I had asked for directions were weeping.
In the countryside, there is no drama aside from the sharp bends. About 300 years ago, wolves roamed here. The autumn heather is flowering in the muted light. The spits of rain are too half-hearted to count. High above the road, the 16th-century castle built on the site of a 14th-century fortification and restored in the last century by the 6th Duke of Devonshire, acts as a gateway into Lismore, which is now a heritage town.
The streets are quiet. Through an ancient, stone arch, down a short lane is the old market with its enclosed series of stone buildings and cobbled courtyards. Having bought it from an English artist friend who had used one of the buildings as a studio, "the rest of it was a roofless ruin", Murphy transformed the entire market complex into a clochan with enough land to graze a horse. The small, lovingly-salvaged hamlet is an act of the imagination as well as a practical example of sympathetic restoration. It is welcoming, peaceful and private, each building has its own function; living area, kitchen, office, library, bedrooms. All accessible, communal, yet also independent, private - as is Dervla Murphy.
There is a car parked in the lane. It's not hers, is it? "No, I've never had one. I don't believe in them." Candid, open-faced, she looks cheerful, if slightly apprehensive and very shrewd. Although her books are very much her stories - she has never disguised her love for her daughter Rachel, nor her fondness for her various bicycles - and are never presented as clinical, impersonal studies, she nevertheless does not dominate them in the style of a Redmond O'Hanlon or the famously egocentric Paul Theroux. Now 65, she could be 50, and is very physical - tanned, not weather-beaten - and seems dressed for a climb or at least a cycle along the beautiful local mountain paths.
A sturdy, compact figure, she moves with the grace of a far more slight individual. Her voice is low-pitched, her delivery slow, measured, almost a drawl and her accent more Dublin than I had expected. She has neither arrogance nor the defiance of many travellers, who often enjoy affecting boredom when being interviewed. Murphy is almost unnervingly self-effacing, has always been critical of her writing and is more at ease speaking about other things. "I have never been able to ask the personal questions, I can ask about politics and the mood of a society, but I'm not good on the individual stories," she says, but she is a more adriot witness than she realises: South From The Limpopo is a book of voices and lives.
Sitting in her workroom, where she writes, a tall stack of books, including William Dalrymple's From The Holy Mountain and O'Hanlon's Congo Journey is waiting to be read. At its finest, travel-writing can offer the best of reportage, personal experience, social and cultural history and descriptive writing. Murphy's face lights up at the mention of writers such as Colin Thubron and Paddy Leigh-Fermor and Jonathan Raban, of whom she says "he is wonderful". While her own early reading was dominated by fiction, she now tends to read more history and travel. She first read the work of Freya Stark, the last of the Victorians, a long time ago. In 1984, she re-read her work. "I interviewed her for her 90th birthday. Twenty years earlier, when I first met her, she terrified me. She was as formidable as one would imagine. I'd always worshipped her." But the last meeting proved a sad encounter: "Her memory was gone. We didn't have a conversation. I wrote about the books instead."
Writers such as Stark and earlier, almost pioneering figures such as Isabel Byrd Bishop and Mary Kingsley heralded the beginning of Britain's domination of travel writing which had really begun with Mungo Parks, continued through to Darwin and Livingstone and flourished during the late 19th century and well into this century. The late Bruce Chatwin is credited with having re-invented the genre in the late 1970s. The British tend to feel they own the tradition . . . "Well, considering some of the writers we've mentioned, the claims are justified, don't you think?" she says. "Dalrymple belongs to the great classical tradition as does Colin Thubron: he's very meticulous and even learns the languages before he goes."
Of her home town she says: "Lismore has a remarkable history. In the 8th century it was a university city: King Alfred the Great and many scholars from the continent studied here."
The `famous and holy city' of Lismore was first ransacked by the Danes, and later by Raymond le Gros in 1173. King John replaced the razed college with a castle. That too was destroyed. The local bishops then built another castle which Sir Walter Raleigh acquired before selling it to Richard Boyle, the first earl of Cork.
Murphy has lived here all her life. "It is home. West Waterford is my territory." Her book-lined living quarters are simple, not spartan, and are made comfortable by the restful, bookish atmosphere. Only the "Ban Hare Coursing" sticker fixed to a window indicates the campaigning aspect of her personality. "Travel is work, here is where I holiday," she says. Her home is a haven. The town could be miles away. No wonder the cats look smug.
Anyone who has read Murphy's relentlessly honest autobiography, Wheels Within Wheels (1979) might conclude that her travelling is a response to the phsyical confinement she experienced caring for her invalid mother from the age of 14 until her mother finally died as Murphy approached 30. But she disputes this: "As long as I can remember, before there were any restraints, I wanted to travel as far and as wide as possible."
The ironies of a difficult relationship with her mother during those last years are intensified by the tremendously supportive influence her mother had been for the young Dervla. "She encouraged me so much and was always discussing books. Other people read books - my mother analysed them, and of course, as well as reading the English classics she also read biographies about their authors and so introduced me to them as people." What had been a uniquely egalitarian relationship had become battered and bitter by the time her mother died in August 1962, exactly 18 months after Dervla's father. "I have to say I was glad when the end came. Her suffering had affected her mind and she was no longer the person I had known, the mother who had encouraged me to go off cycling to France and Germany in 1950 and to Spain in 1952. Can you imagine a mother encouraging a daughter to do that?" As for having to leave school at 14 to tend her mother, Murphy says: "Oh, I didn't mind that. I was never interested in conventional education. Not going to school left me more time for reading and practising writing."
Her ambition to write was formed by the age of five. Curiosity rather than a hunger for adventure made her a travel-writer. "There may have been some sense of adventure in the beginning, wanting to see places that were different, but . . ." she pauses, "I think it was a compulsion to write, more than just travel. The travelling had always fed the writing."
Asia and Africa have continued to draw her. "I suppose I'm interested in unusual places. But I don't use this ridiculous word `explore': no-one should use it now. I mean there is nowhere left to discover, everywhere has been explored."
Despite the personal touches in her work, she appears an unlikely character to have written an autobiography at 46. "I didn't mean to write one. I wrote it for Rachel, to explain things to her - well, really, to explain me and to disentangle all the conflicting emotions left for me by my relationship with my parents." Writing that book also taught her that she was not dependent on travel. "When Rachel was born in 1968, I put an end to my travels until she was five and I did not miss travelling. During that time I did a huge number of reviews."
Marriage never appealed to her and Murphy took on the role of single parent at a time when it was far more uncommon than it has become. She has never been comfortable with the ethos of feminism. "I was uneasy about the devaluing of the roles of wife and mother. There is no more important job than mothering a child."
There are many issues she feels strongly about; careless urbanisation, racism, nuclear disarmament (when she was arrested in 1983 under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, it was later put to her that this had happened because she was wearing three anti-nuclear badges) - "and you could amend that to disarmament in general, as well as the use of landmines. The selling of crowd-control equipment such as rubber bullets, water canons and armoured land rovers by Western states to repressive governments . . ." Wheels Within Wheels is a strange story as well as a fascinating chapter of Irish social history. Born in 1931 to Dublin parents who had arrived in Lismore on the day they married, Murphy was an only child. By the time she was a year old, her mother, who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, depended on a walking stick. By Dervla's second birthday, her mother, then 26, could no longer walk.
As a couple, the Murphys were unusual - different enough to be seen as eccentric. Dervla's mother ran the home according to a strict domestic ritual, echoing the values of the upper-middle classes, despite the fact the family lived in poverty. Her father, the county librarian, was bookish and somewhat absent-minded. As the years passed, Dervla simply moved away from him. "I began to want to go walking on my own, that's what happened." According to Dervla, "despite living in Lismore for 30 years, they remained Dubliners". As a child, she travelled to Dublin with her parents about once a month. "The Dublin of my youth was a beautiful city, I loved it. But I can't remember now when I was last there." She seems quite hard on her earlier self and describes herself as a "nasty" child. "I don't think I'm being too hard, I was nasty. There's no denying that," she says matter of factly.
The reality of South Africa was very different to what she had expected. "I was pretty shattered. I thought I could understand the dynamics of the place - I've read Brink and Gordimer, Coeztee, Brytenbach . . . I can honestly say I have been reading about it for 40 years. I was so wrong." Murphy arrived there after several journeys throughout Africa, most memorably Ethiopia. "I was used to the blacks in all the other African countries being friendly and welcoming to me. This was my first experience of being treated with suspicion." On completing the first of the three journeys which made up the 6,000-mile odyssey on which South From The Limpopo is based, she was conscious of being "entangled in a love-hate relationship with South Africa, a baffling emotional involvement with its variegated tribes and their tragic problems."
Far from appearing to be a Brave New World, the South Africa emerging from Murphy's impressions is an aggressive, terrifying cauldron in which the population is still struggling with old resentments and prejudices as well as new complications. There, she watched the Government of National Unity, a collection of "heroes and villains, the honest and the dishonest, the brilliant and the dim-witted, idealists and schemers, rabid racists and fervent liberals", preparing to vote for a black President of the Republic of South Africa. This is not the first time she has attempted a book which tries to explain a society as much as describe it. In A Place Apart (1978) in which she writes "no individual is free who cannot evolve beyond the confines of the mental world into which he was born" Murphy investigated the complexities of Northern Ireland. Tales From Two Cities (1987) is a study of racism in two of Britain's larger cities, Bradford and Birmingham. Were there many parallels to be found between South Africa and Northern Ireland? "No, not really. It's very misleading to make comparisons - apart from the fundamental handicap of very deep prejudices between the communities."
Still making plans, her latest project is to travel to Laos in November. By then she will be 66. Is she conscious of age? She makes many references to it in South From the Limpopo, although they refer to the way in which she is perceived by others. "You can't not think of it when you've reached - and passed - 60. But it really depends on the individual. I suppose I'm most conscious of it because of the amount of memories I've accumulated, the way my experiences stretch back now. It's the trade-off, age gives you your experiences. And also you're aware of changes. I see great changes in Dublin. Lismore has changed greatly in my life."
She may stop cycling at 80 "if I have to. And then, I can always set off on my feet instead".
South From The Limpopo by Dervla Murphy will be published by John Murray on September 25th, price £18.99
