“Such a beautiful place, to be with friends. Dobby is happy to be with his friend, Harry Potter,” said Dobby, the house-elf from the famous book and movie series Harry Potter. But it seems Dobby made more friends than just Harry Potter and they love him even after his death. Harry Potter fans just made a strong case for a rise in the list of fandom rankings with one act of theirs.They forced a new multimillion-pound power cable between the UK and Ireland to be relocated after complaining it would desecrate the ‘grave’ of Dobby, the fictional elf. In the movie ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’, the character was laid to rest on Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire. Fans of the wizard series and of the helpful and wise elf come to leave stones reading ‘Here Lies Dobby’ despite being asked not to by the landowner, the National Trust, since the beach is an ecologically sensitive site.
Protecting Dobby’s ‘grave’
The $570 million Greenlink interconnector, which linked the National Grid of the UK to Ireland, was initially going to pass through the site of the ‘grave;, shared the project manager Simon Ludlam with the Energy Revolution podcast. Fans became aware of the plans after Ludlam pointed out where the 125-mile (200km) cable to County Wexford would go underground at Freshwater West during a BBC interview. “We did the shot, we finished, I went back to London, and they then aired it a couple of weeks later. And we got hundreds of calls, I mean, hundreds of calls,” he said as per a report by The Guardian.Ludlam said he did not know who Dobby was and became confused by the calls the company received, saying a colleague told him: “Apparently we’re going to go straight through Dobby’s grave”.“I said: ‘Dobby, who’s Dobby? I don’t know Dobby?’ I said: ‘He’s a fictitious character in a fictitious book, the whole thing is fictitious, what are you talking about?’” He said the colleague told him: “No it’s very, very serious.”
Moving away from the grave
The firm then enlisted planners to find a new route that avoided the supposed grave. “A lot of people were very happy about that, and the project is now going [ahead] and Dobby’s happy.” Greenlink has two converter stations that are connected by cables under the Irish Sea, according to the company. Developers used horizontal direct drilling to lay the cables in a way that avoids creating trenches in the ground. “We didn’t disturb the beach or the dunes or Dobby’s grave in any way,” said James O’Reilly, Greenlink’s chief executive as per the New York Times. The cable has been operational since the beginning of last year.What must be noted is that the project also went quite close to some real Bronze Age remains including urns associated with human burial, but still, what mattered and moved people to call was the disturbance that would have been caused to a fictional elf’s ‘grave’.It wasn’t the first time that the pile of stones and pebbles, many with messages to Dobby, had been under threat. In 2022, environmental officials became concerned that the site’s popularity with tourists was having a negative effect on the beach. A Welsh conservation charity ultimately said the memorial could remain, but asked visitors to stop leaving offerings such as socks, a symbol of Dobby’s friendship with Harry.Fans can keep on visiting Dobby’s memorial and leaving stones to honour him, and now they can take pride in the fact that they rerouted millions of dollars of infrastructure as they moved a cable that links the power grids of two nations, all underground, and all because they are attached to a dead CGI elf that in the movie, was buried in Cornwall, not Wales.