Pedalling on Regardless

So, winter has arrived in the new normal here in the Northeast of Scotland. Gone are our bittingly cold, but gloriously sunny winter days: to be replaced by endless days of rain and flooded cycle tracks. Bah, time for a bit less outdoors and a bit more reading.

I have been a long time fan of Dervla Murphy, ever since reading her Full Tilt, the account of her cycle from Dunkirk to Delhi. So, when I came across a copy of Wheels within Wheels in a charity shop I snapped it up.

Wheels Within Wheels is less a conventional autobiography and more a study of how a personality is forged under pressure, affection, constraint, and curiosity. The book makes it obvious that both her child and adult selves grew out of the same soil: a home that blended intellectual seriousness, emotional complexity, and a fierce insistence on independence. You come away with the sense that her later life of solitary travel wasn’t an escape from her upbringing but a natural evolution of it.

Her childhood was shaped first and foremost by her parents. Her mother’s severe rheumatoid arthritis, and the demands it placed on the young Dervla, forced her into adult responsibilities early. The constant caregiving built not only resilience but an instinctive self-reliance—qualities that later underpinned her willingness to cycle alone through harsh and unfamiliar landscapes. But Murphy is honest about the cost: the guilt she experienced whenever she left home, and the tug-of-war between duty and the hunger for the wider world. These tensions shaped a child who was both deeply loyal and quietly rebellious.

Her father, a librarian, contributed the other half of her formation: books. The intellectual companionship he offered—rare in mid-century Ireland—gave her a vocabulary for exploring the world and the confidence to question orthodoxies. Their shared reading was an exercise in mental wandering that prefigured her later physical wandering. Yet she didn’t romanticise this; she’s frank about the emotional distances that coexisted with the intellectual closeness, and this mix of affection and constraint created the distinctive Murphy voice: warm, sharp-eyed, never sentimental.

The Ireland she grew up in also mattered. It was rural, conservative, and tightly bound by Catholic expectations—restrictions she felt acutely. That pressure pushed her towards an inner independence long before she could express it outwardly. Cycling became her first escape route. The bicycle offered solitude, agency, and a physical method for extending her world. It’s clear that the experience of pedalling out of childhood’s constraints laid the psychological groundwork for her later, more ambitious journeys across continents.

As an adult, those same traits—stoicism, curiosity, fierce independence—deepened through the challenges she faced at home. For years she was bound by the responsibilities of caring for her parents, delaying the long journeys she had dreamed of since reading travel literature as a girl. This long postponement intensified the determination that finally propelled her to set off on Full Tilt in her early thirties. You can see how these years sharpened her writing: she learned to observe people carefully, to weigh motivation and character, and to see resilience not as glamour but as everyday necessity.

What shaped her as a writer is essentially what shaped her as a traveller: clarity of observation, moral seriousness, and a refusal to dramatise. She didn’t travel to boast or to collect anecdotes but to understand. Wheels Within Wheels shows where that impulse came from: a childhood marked by quiet endurance, intellectual depth, and a constant tension between duty and freedom. Her adult character—the one readers admire in her travel books—is simply that childhood made mobile, with a bicycle under her and the world opening at last.

This is not a keeper for me, or at least I will not be going back to reread it, but I am glad I found it and took a lot from it. Recommended for skimming and for the excellence of her writing and certainly not for its cycling content.