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£500m or Dobby's Grave?
— 2 mins read
Hundreds of Harry Potter fans pressure engineers to reroute the Greenlink interconnector
Engineers rerouted a £430 million undersea electricity cable to avoid the makeshift grave of Dobby the house-elf on a Welsh beach. Hundreds of Harry Potter fans had complained about the original route.
The Greenlink interconnector, a 190km cable linking the British and Irish electricity grids, was planned to come ashore at Freshwater West in Pembrokeshire. The beach was the filming location for Dobby's death scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Simon Ludlam, project director at Etchea Energy, said the original route would have gone 'straight through' the memorial. He told the Energy Revolution podcast that 'hundreds of calls' from fans prompted the change, BBC News reported.
A €64 million Irish housing scheme had to drop 129 homes to save a blackthorn 'fairy tree'.
'We went quite close to some real Bronze Age remains, but we avoided Dobby's grave', Mr Ludlam said. The solution made 'a lot of people very happy', he added, 'and Dobby's happy'.
A cairn of painted pebbles for an elf who never existed
Dobby is a fictional character. But since filming, fans have built a cairn of stones and painted pebbles at the spot, many carrying messages such as 'Here lies Dobby, a free elf'.
The National Trust, which manages the beach, decided in 2022 that the memorial could stay. It asked visitors to stop leaving socks, trinkets, and painted items, warning they could harm wildlife and the marine environment.
The route now runs close to genuine burial remains
An archaeological evaluation for the project in 2019 found evidence of a possible Bronze Age collared urn near the revised route. The urn dates to around 1700 to 1500 BC and is associated with human burial.
The fictional grave was avoided. The route ran nearer to the real one.
Ireland has moved roads and housing for fairy trees
Similar decisions have been made across the Irish Sea. In 1999, a bypass route in County Clare was adjusted to preserve the Latoon fairy bush, a whitethorn tree protected after a campaign citing local folklore.
In August 2025, Ireland's planning body approved a €64 million housing scheme in Rathnew, County Wicklow, on condition that a blackthorn 'fairy tree' was kept. The developer had to drop 129 homes from the original plan.
British projects are routinely delayed by wildlife rules
British infrastructure schemes are regularly redesigned or delayed by protected species surveys under planning and habitats law. HS2 built a £100 million structure to protect bats in Buckinghamshire, and road and rail schemes have been held up by bat roosts and, in some cases, rare earthworms.
Every reroute, redesign, and survey lands on the households and businesses that pay for the grid through their energy bills.
Greenlink began commercial operations in January 2025 and was officially launched that April. The cable now carries up to 500MW of electricity between the two countries. Dobby's cairn remains on the beach, and visitors are asked to take only photographs.
