How Dobby’s Grave Rerouted a €500m Ireland-Wales Power Cable

Greenlink is not a trivial piece of kit. The 500-megawatt link lets Ireland import electricity from Britain and export surplus renewable power the other way, a growing lifeline as the grid strains and the cost of electricity in Ireland keeps climbing. So how did a character from a children’s book end up dictating where a high-voltage cable goes underground?

‘Who’s Dobby?’

Project manager Simon Ludlam told the Energy Revolution podcast that the cable had to be re-routed after his office was bombarded with objections once the planned landing point was made public. The spot in question was Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, where the death of Dobby was filmed for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1) — and where fans have since built a memorial.

We got hundreds of calls, I mean hundreds of calls. My colleague said the cable was going straight through Dobby’s grave. I said, ‘Dobby, who’s Dobby?’ He’s a fictitious character in a fictitious book. The whole thing is fictitious.

The trouble started, Ludlam explained, after he pointed out where the cable would run underground during a BBC News interview. Almost immediately, his office was inundated. What began as a handful of queries quickly snowballed into a co-ordinated campaign from fans determined to protect a spot that has become a place of pilgrimage, dotted with painted stones, socks and handwritten notes left in tribute to the character.

Ludlam admits he initially dismissed the fuss, but soon realised the concerns were, in his words, “very, very serious.” As RTÉ News reported, engineers went back to the planners to work out exactly how to move the cable so it would not go anywhere near the memorial — a rare instance of pop-culture sentiment overriding an engineering blueprint.

The Wexford-to-Wales link that Dobby diverted

It is a curious footnote to a serious project: a piece of critical Irish infrastructure, worth half a billion euro, nudged off course by a painted stone and a legion of Harry Potter fans. The final route swerves the memorial entirely, and everyone — planners, landowners and grieving film buffs alike — appears satisfied. Dobby, it turns out, still has friends. And they have the National Grid’s phone number.