Surrey trailblazer Elspeth Beard says today’s “fearmongering 24/7 news” culture is stopping would-be adventurers from following in her tyre tracks.

The first British woman to ride a motorbike around the world, Beard has been speaking on the motorcycle podcast Full Chat about her remarkable 35,000-mile solo journey between 1982 and 1984.

Now 66, the architect and author of Lone Rider, from Godalming, travelled across continents at a time before sat navs, mobile phones or electronic riding aids. While her achievement has cemented her reputation as one of the most inspirational bikers of all time, she believes the lack of constant news and information was, in some ways, an advantage.

“There’s just too much information and what you don’t know, you don’t worry about,” she said. “Actually, you find when you get there it isn’t a problem anyway.”

Recalling her journey through Iran shortly after the revolution and during the Iran–Iraq War, she added: “Everybody said ‘you’ll never get in and it’ll be really dangerous.’ It wasn’t easy, obviously. There were roadblocks, tanks and soldiers everywhere, but I got through it. The people in the country were incredibly kind and helpful.

“In those days you didn’t have this 24/7 news, which seems to be putting this fear into people all the time, telling them everything is so bad, awful and dangerous.”

Beard set off aged 23, leaving behind friends and family in London following a painful break-up while studying architecture. The trip – long before she converted Munstead Water Tower near Godalming into her home – proved transformative.

“I was at a kind of crossroads in my life, not really knowing what I wanted to do, and I was feeling pretty miserable. So I just thought, why don’t I try and ride my bike around the world?

“To me, it was just something that I did. I do still find it quite weird that people now think that what I did was such an extraordinary thing because, to me, I just did it.”