David Macpherson read history at Cambridge and completed his teacher training at Bristol University. Before starting his career as a teacher, he spent 18 months working in Nepal as a volunteer for the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) with Tibetan refugees. This gave him a life-long love of the Tibetan people and Nepal. He has recently completed a novel about a Tibetan nomad family’s escape from the Chinese army in 1959 and their subsequent journey over the Himalayas to find sanctuary in Pokhara, Nepal. The book called Nomad has not yet been published.      After 10 years as a history teacher in Scotland and England, David went back to Nepal as Director of the British Nepal Medical Trust, helping with tuberculosis and leprosy control in the Eastern Region. He then taught history in Cheltenham for a further 5 years before becoming a Headmaster for 20 years until retiring to Dorset.

Defenders of Mai-dun is the first book David has had published. Maiden Castle and the conflicting and scanty evidence of how the hillfort fell to the Romans after AD 43 fascinated him. He researched the subject extensively in the Dorset History Centre and the County Museum in Dorchester. Little is known about the Celts of Dorset, a tribe called the Durotriges. David’s book tries accurately to follow the archaeological research of Sir Mortimer Wheeler and Niall Sharples on Maiden Castle by creating characters to fill in details of the likely story. The character of Vespasian, one of Rome’s greatest emperors, is well known in history, though there are few details about his time in Dorset. Defenders of Mai-dun gives a picture of his impact in the southwest.       David has just completed a second novel set in the southwest about the dramatic effects on one local farming family of Monmouth’s Rebellion in 1685 and the Bloody Assizes in Dorchester. He hopes the book will be published soon. His next project is a novel about smuggling in the 18th century along the coast between Lulworth and Abbotsbury, which he is currently researching. (http://www.rovingpress.co.uk/defendersofmaidun.html)