A Name For My Print Studio

While I continue to plan my new studio and look into the costs and potential suppliers, I’ve been toying with the idea of giving it a name.

I discovered shortly after we moved here that our full address consists of a house name ‘Síthean’ (pronounced shee-an). It is Gaelic for Fairy Fort or Fairy Hill.

It brought vivid memories of a trip back to Ireland when I was a child. I was travelling in the back of my dad’s car with my Granny (my Mum’s Mum). I saw a little hill with a circle of trees around the perimeter. Granny said that where the fairies lived and then began to tell me stories about the fairies that lived in the hill fort and what would happen to you if you upset them.

Many years later, when our own children were little, we had a family holiday in Co. Waterford. One day we dropped into a convenience store which shared my paternal granny’s surname, Power. We got chatting to the shop owner who proceeded to tell us about another fairy hill in the mountains where if you parked your car close by the fairies would come out and push your car uphill.

Well, with two small children in the car, this had to be seen to be believed so off we went to find said fairy hill. It was a lonely spot, with no one to be seen for miles around, just a bare tree bent by the wind (the landmark we were told to look out for). We parked the car facing up the hill and turned the engine off. Very weirdly, the car did begin to move uphill, apparently all on its own! We could not find a logical explanation for it. There was nothing we could see, so it had to be the fairies.

So, back to the naming of the studio. I’m thinking ‘Sìthean Studio’.