How Harry Potter Fans Forced a £430 Million Energy Project to Reroute Around Dobby’s “Grave”
Turns out even a fictional house elf can hold up a nine-figure infrastructure project.
The Greenlink Interconnector — a £430 million, roughly 190km high-voltage cable carrying power between Pembrokeshire, Wales and County Wexford, Ireland — was originally routed to make landfall at Freshwater West beach, the real-world filming location of Dobby’s death scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Over the years, fans have turned the spot into an informal shrine, piling painted stones (and, in the past, socks) at what’s become known as “Dobby’s grave,” complete with a headstone reading “Here lies Dobby, a free elf.”
Wait — didn’t this cable already get built?
It did. Greenlink has been quietly moving power between the two grids since February 2025, and the reroute itself happened years earlier, back during the project’s planning stage around 2020–21. The reason it’s making headlines now is simple: nobody had told the story publicly until this week, when Simon Ludlam — who managed the project and now heads the advisory firm Etchea Energy — recounted the whole saga on The Energy Revolution podcast. It’s not new news so much as a great behind-the-scenes anecdote finally seeing daylight.
How it actually happened
Ludlam explained that once his team had signed off the landfall plan with every authority, landowner, and local resident, BBC Wales asked him down to the beach for a quick interview. On camera, he described in “great graphic detail” how the buried cable would come in under the sea and beach and then run up into the dunes — not realizing those dunes are exactly where Dobby’s grave sits.
Once the segment aired, the phones started ringing. “Hundreds of calls,” Ludlam recalled — enough that his colleague Tom, who worked in permitting, came to him and said they’d have to respond. Ludlam’s first reaction was blank: “Dobby? Who’s Dobby?” Told that fans were furious the cable would run through the elf’s grave, he pushed back — “He is a fictitious character in a fictitious book, the whole thing’s fictitious, what are you talking about?”
His colleague insisted it was “very, very serious.” So — even though the route had already been approved — the team went back to the planners and designers to work out how to reroute the cable around the memorial entirely. The change was made. No figure has been given for what the reroute cost, and there’s no indication it delayed the finished project.
Greenlink went live in February 2025 and now shuttles up to 500 megawatts between the two grids — humming along a slightly longer path, all so a pile of painted rocks for a house elf could stay undisturbed. As Ludlam put it: the project’s running, “and Dobby’s happy.”
Would you make the pilgrimage to Dobby’s grave? Let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to follow along for more Harry Potter news.
Source: The Energy Revolution Podcast
