Harry Potter fans force diversion of undersea cable to protect Dobby’s ‘grave’

A £430 million (S$741.90 million) undersea cable project between Britain and Ireland was rerouted after Harry Potter fans found out the original plan would have disturbed a shrine to Dobby the House Elf.

The 190km-Greenlink high-voltage cable, to supply energy from Britain to Ireland, was supposed to be laid between County Wexford in Ireland and Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

The beach is where Dobby’s death scene in the film Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows - the seventh and final book in JK Rowling’s wildly successful series on the boy wizard - was filmed.

The beach became popular with fans following the release of the two-parter film in 2010 and 2011, and they left socks and pebbles with messages written to Dobby at his unofficial resting place.

In an interview on The Energy Revolution podcast released on Aug 5, project manager Simon Ludlam said the cable was originally “going to go straight through” the memorial.

He said he did an interview with British public service broadcaster BBC on the project, noting that the cable would be underground.

The interview aired two weeks later, and that was when furious fans began leaving his company, Etchea Energy, “hundreds of calls”.

Ludlam said a colleague told him about the nature of the calls and that the cable was “apparently going to go straight through Dobby’s grave”.

A confused Ludlam at that time responded with “Dobby? Who’s Dobby?”, adding: “He is a fictitious character in a fictitious book, the whole thing’s fictitious, what are you talking about?”.

But the colleague insisted it was a “very, very serious” issue.

Ludlam said his firm went back to the planners and discussed how to reroute the cable so “we wouldn’t go anymore into Dobby’s grave”.

As a result, Ludlam said a lot of people were very happy with the outcome, and the project is now going ahead.