Simon Ludlam had never heard of Dobby.
In 2018, Ludlam was managing the Greenlink interconnector, a $580 million (£430 million) high-voltage cable running about 125 miles under the Irish Sea to connect the electricity grids of Ireland and Britain. He went out to Freshwater West, a beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales, to film a segment with BBC Wales explaining where the cable would come ashore. It would run under the sea, then under the beach and the dunes, then exit the ground and continue inland to a converter station near Pembroke. Ordinary infrastructure explainer. He went back to London.
The segment aired a couple of weeks later, and the phones at his firm, Etchea Energy, started ringing.
“We got hundreds of calls, I mean, hundreds of calls,” Ludlam told the Energy Revolution podcast in an account picked up this month by BBC News.
He was busy and ignored them until a colleague told him he could not keep doing so. The problem, the colleague explained, was that the cable was set to surface right where Dobby is buried.
“He’s a fictitious character in a fictitious book. The whole thing is fictitious,” Ludlam recalled saying.
He was correct and it did not matter. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, the house-elf dies rescuing Harry and is buried in the sand outside Shell Cottage, which in the books sits near the fictional Cornish village of Tinworth. The scene was shot at Freshwater West.
Since the film came out in 2010, fans have built an unofficial memorial there out of painted stones, many of them carrying versions of the epitaph Harry carves in the film. People fly in from Italy, Australia, and South Africa to leave one. They also leave socks, a reference to the garment that earned Dobby his freedom. That is the part the National Trust has been trying to stop for years because Freshwater West is an ecologically sensitive site, and paint chips and old socks end up in the sea and inside seabirds. The Trust ran a public consultation in 2022 and agreed to let the memorial stay while asking people to please stop adding to it.
Ludlam went back to the planners.
The exit point moved. The cable now surfaces away from the memorial, and Greenlink CEO James O’Reilly has since told The New York Times that the grave, along with the natural shape of the beach and dunes, helped determine where the cable finally came up. Ludlam summed up the outcome: “The project is now going ahead, and Dobby’s happy.”
The relocation put the cable closer to something considerably older. An archaeological evaluation carried out for Greenlink in 2019 and filed with Pembrokeshire council turned up the rim of an inverted pottery vessel that appeared to be a Bronze Age collared urn dating from roughly 1700 to 1500 BC. The type of vessel is typically associated with human burial, and it was found in what may have been a round barrow. Ludlam has acknowledged that the route ended up “quite close to some real Bronze Age remains.”
Several people have pointed out the irony of spending planning effort on a fictional grave and then parking the cable next to an actual one. Others have questioned whether the fans changed anything at all.
Greenlink always intended to install the cable at the landfall using horizontal directional drilling, boring under the beach and dunes rather than trenching across them, and that plan appears in public project documents from October 2018. Critics have used that to argue the beach was never at risk and that the whole episode is an anecdote in search of a story. The counter is that nobody claimed otherwise. The disputed spot was never the drilled section. It was the point where the cable comes back up.
Greenlink entered commercial operation in early 2025 and now moves up to 500 megawatts in either direction between the two grids, enough for something on the order of 380,000 homes. The memorial is still on the beach.
