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Morag recalls being “quite swotty” at primary school, a work ethic, she admits, superseded by a “rebellious phase” in secondary school.
“I did pass my exams though,” she laughs, “then for some reason did a one year course in secretarial skills.
“Then I started a law and psychology degree at university but got glandular fever and while I had that all my friends dropped out so I did not carry on with it.
“After that I went round doing itinerant work, fruit picking in the fields at various locations – Angus, Montrose and Cambridge.”
It’s fascinating to learn how Morag ended up in Galloway, her story echoing that
of so many others for whom a random encounter changed their lives.
“I first came to Knockengorroch when I was 19 after Simon Holmes, the owner, suggested why don’t you come and stay on my farm?” she recalls with a smile.
“We were living at a lay-by near Carsphairn and Simon had only pulled over by chance.
“We had literally only been passing through on the way to the Highlands – but we didn’t get any further.
“We were at Knockengorroch for nine months and lived in an old caravan – whose previous occupant had been a goat. It was perfect and I really liked being there.
“We did various jobs including Christmas tree cutting and delivery which was pretty wild work up there in December – they were good days.
“After that I went fruit picking and travelled for two years, had my first child, settled in Carsphairn, and had another baby.
“We were there from 1996 to 1999 then moved to high up the Garroch Glen near Dalry where we had a smallholding with a Jersey cow for milking.
“Then I started up the Galloway Soap Company and customers included
the Turnberry Hotel – pre-Donald Trump!”
Morag can still reel off the magical process by which fatty oils, alkali and scents are combined to make the perfumed finished product.
“There were three types of oil which would be heated up to a certain temperature,” she explains.
“Water was added to the lye – caustic soda – which produces a chemical reaction and the liquid heats up.
“You wait until it cools to the same temperature as the oil then mix them together.
“After a certain time it starts to thicken and that’s when you add your natural ingredients to colour and perfume the soap.
“Certain herb extracts like alkanet root are red in the oil but turn a beautiful purple when added, which is really good for making lavender
soap.
“I used to go round all the local shows, games and events with a stall – and was part of the Made in Galloway stand at the Highland Show.”
Apart from keeping the populace clean and scented, Morag worked part time as a learning support assistant at Dalry Primary School, and was on the parent council as well.
And away from work, not entirely surprisingly, her favourite sports weren’t exactly conventional.
“I started playing tambourelli – the Scottish version of tamburello – and played with a shuttlecock, bats and net,” she says.
“Tamburello is the European
version and is played on a much bigger court, with no net, only the bats are the same.
“I was in the Scottish team, travelling to Germany, Italy, France and Spain for tournaments and played for 14 years – I only stopped in 2019.
“I also travelled with my axe-throwing to Sweden and Germany, doing demonstrations for the company that made the axes.
“I won the women’s Scottish axe-throwing championship and in 2013 was part of Dumfries and Galloway’s Team Xylodom.
“At the British Open Axe Throwing competition in Warwickshire we beat teams from all over the UK and Sweden, winning all the trophies.
“I won the female event there.”
Hurling razor-sharp implements
at a wooden target needs a keen eye –
a talent, I suppose equally
applicable to Morag’s real passion, photography.
She and husband Ted are award-winning, professional landscape photographic artists – based both in Italy and Scotland.
Leeming + Paterson’s striking imagery is widely published and has been exhibited around the world. Their achievements are a source of great pride.
“After I met Ted I started working in photography and the arts,” she tells me.
“That’s what he did and I naturally fell into it with him.
“We did a lot of abstract photography which at that time was an emerging genre.
“It was quite controversial because the traditionalists would complain about the blurry, impressionistic style, which sometimes was completely unrecognisable from the original subject.
“That was the complete opposite of traditional landscape photographers do, because according to their rules everything was about depth of field and being pin sharp.
“So some people found our work quite a challenging concept at the time.”
I suppress a pang of jealousy when Morag reveals she and Ted spend part of their year working on location in the Maritime Alps, in Liguria.
Also, how does the land and communities of northern Italy compare to those of Galloway, I wonder?
“Well, the place we stay in has three times the population per square kilometre compared with Dalry,” she explains.
“Everybody owns a bit of land and it’s a very different system.
“The land is owned by thousands of people in every village because they don’t have the tradition of handing it down to the eldest kid – instead it gets split between them.
“And there are no fixed fences – you can walk hundreds of kilometres and never see a fence, perhaps only the odd temporary electrified one where the animals are hefted.
“It gives you a totally different perspective on land management, land ownership and rural
populations.
“It’s much more populated out there – although they do have droughts and extreme heat in summer.”
Morag also finds time to be a trustee of Glenkens District Trust, the Scottish Woodlot Association and Forest Policy Group, and is a member of both Dalry Community Council and Communities for Diverse Forestry.
She and Ted usually spend the post-winter period in Italy – but this year was different.
“This is the first springtime we’ve spent in Galloway for a few years,” she tells me.
“It’s wonderful to reacquaint yourself with the return of the swallows, the ducks and the cuckoos.
“We have 11 acres between Dalry and Carsphairn, which we were able to buy through a Dumfries and Galloway Council smallholding scheme for part of the northern Glenkens to combat rural depopulation and diversify land ownership.
“We planted half the hillside with lots of native trees like hazel, elder, birch, oak and Scots pine and the rest regenerated of its own accord.
“Now it’s beautiful – like an artwork.
“We did a project over five years taking a photo from the same spot and you can see the process of regrowth.
“Now the place is unbelievably biodiverse.
“It was just grazing and bracken before but it’s had a fence round it for 15 years and what has grown out of the ground has been amazing.
“Everything has just burst back into life with all these different species.
“And now you can walk in the
woods whereas before it was just a bare field.”
