An expansive beach in Wales is the site of one of one of the saddest moments of the “Harry Potter” movie series. It’s where Dobby, a freed house elf, dies in Harry’s arms during “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.”
“I want to bury him,” the young wizard-in-training says after the elf takes his last breath. “Properly. Without magic.”
Fans of the 2010 movie assembled a real memorial to the imaginary elf on the Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales, where the scene was filmed. “Here lies Dobby, a free elf,” says a sign atop a pile of stones, a memorial that became a tourist destination for the series’ many admirers.
But in 2019, the site was threatened by plans to run a large electrical cable under the beach, part of a multimillion-dollar effort to transport electricity between Ireland and Britain.
That year, Simon Ludlam, the project manager for the electricity cable known as Greenlink, appeared on BBC Wales to explain the project, standing on the beach where Dobby was buried.
Fans revolted.
“After it aired, we began to get calls. Many, many, many calls,” Mr. Ludlam, a managing partner at Etchea Energy, said in an interview on Monday.
Never mind that the place Dobby dies in the book “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” is in Cornwall, not Wales. Never mind that elves aren’t real (as far as we know). Never mind that Harry Potter, too, is a made-up character, in a different kind of world from ours.
“The whole thing is fictitious,” Mr. Ludlam remembered telling a colleague after the uproar.
But Mr. Ludlam quickly came to understand that the situation was as serious as Harry’s love for Dobby.
“It was clearly a thing,” he said. “Something we couldn’t ignore.”
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.
After hundreds of phone calls from fans, including some children, the plans changed. The cable was rerouted to avoid Dobby’s grave, while also carefully avoiding archaeological remains from the Bronze Age found near the site, Mr. Ludlam said.
Mr. Ludlam told the story for the first time in depth last week on an episode of the “Energy Revolution” podcast. “We got back with the planners and we discussed exactly how to reroute the cable” to avoid going near the memorial, he said on the podcast.
Other factors also determined the final route of the cable, which connects the electrical grids of Britain and Ireland, said James O’Reilly, Greenlink’s chief executive.
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,” Mr. O’Reilly said.
The cable has been operational since the beginning of last year. Not far away, Dobby continues to rest in peace.
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