Dumfries and Galloway photographer shares her story in Galloway People

dailyrecord.co.uk:

It’s not often you come across an axe-throwing photographer, but this is one of those days.Morag Paterson laughs when I raise an eyebrow at her hobby, surely a pastime usually more associated with grizzled Canadian backwoodsmen than visual landscape artists.“I went to an open day up at Archie McConnell’s wood yard at Penpont where he was having a little axe throwing demonstration,” she chuckles.“I decided to have a go and it came quite naturally to me.“It’s a target with five rings with a maximum score of 25 from five throws, with a bull’s-eye scoring five.“To be competitive you really need to scoring 20-plus and around 23 or 24 to be winning.“I find it really therapeutic – it’s not about power or strength but shifting your body position while you throw.“I would throw 100 axes every morning for practice which I find meditative – there’s quite a bit of elegance and grace to it.“It’s great for your upper body strength although I did rip a stomach muscle one time.“There was a bit of pain when it happened and I woke up the next morning with a haematoma the size of a duck egg on my tummy.“I had to take a month off work.”Now happily ensconced on a smallholding in the northern Glenkens with husband Ted Leeming, Aberdeen-born Morag left “furriboots city” aged three and has only scant recollections of the granite town on the Dee.“Days out at Duthie Park with my mum and dad is the only thing I can remember,” she tells me.“We moved to England and moved a lot because of my dad’s job, first to Bollington near Macclesfield, down to Sussex then back to Cheshire.“I attended four primary schools and two secondary schools over that time.“It’s just how it was – now after all that moving around Galloway really feels like home.”Morag recalls