Harry Potter fans force £430 million UK-Ireland power cable to reroute around Dobby's beach memorial in Wales

A fictional grave on a real beach

Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales, is where the death scene of the house elf Dobby was filmed for the 2010 film "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1." Fans subsequently built an unofficial memorial on the site, a pile of stones and pebbles bearing messages to the character, topped with a sign reading "Here lies Dobby, a free elf." The spot became a tourist destination, with visitors leaving painted stones and socks, the latter a symbol of Dobby's liberation from servitude in the story.

The Greenlink interconnector, a 200 kilometre underground and subsea cable costing £430 million (about €500 million), connects the British and Irish high voltage grids between County Wexford in Ireland and Freshwater West in Wales. The project has been operational since 2025 and transports wind and solar energy between the two countries.

Fan backlash after a BBC interview

In 2019, project manager Simon Ludlam appeared on BBC Wales to explain the Greenlink project, standing on the beach where the memorial sits. After the interview aired, the company received hundreds of phone calls from fans, including children, protesting the planned cable route that would have run directly through the memorial site.

Ludlam, founder of Etchea Energy, recounted the story on the podcast "Energy Revolution." He said he initially did not know who Dobby was and struggled to understand the uproar.

“I said: 'Dobby, who is Dobby? I don't know any Dobby?' I said: 'He is a fictional character in a fictional book, the whole thing is fictitious, what are you talking about?'”

A colleague told him the matter was "very, very serious," and Ludlam came to accept that the fan pressure could not be ignored. The company then commissioned planners to design a new route that would circumvent the memorial.

The rerouted cable and real archaeology

The revised route successfully avoids the Dobby memorial but passes close to genuine Bronze Age archaeological remains. According to Pembrokeshire planning documents cited by the BBC, archaeological trial trenches near the new route revealed the rim of an inverted clay vessel whose style points to a Bronze Age funeral urn dated to around 1700 to 1500 BC.

Ludlam noted the irony that the cable skirted a fictional grave while passing near real burial urns from the Bronze Age. The project is now proceeding, and fans continue to visit the site to leave painted pebbles and messages.

A memorial under recurring pressure

This was not the first time the Dobby memorial faced scrutiny. In 2022, the National Trust, the conservation charity that owns the land, decided the memorial could remain on the ecologically sensitive beach, but asked visitors to stop leaving offerings such as socks and souvenirs, which were damaging the fragile coastal environment. The charity had previously raised concerns that the site's popularity with tourists was having a negative effect on the beach.

Ludlam told the story publicly for the first time on the "Energy Revolution" podcast in 2026, several years after the rerouting decision was made.