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Transcript:
Okay, this is, admittedly, a little story. Part of my process for making these videos is that I read a lot of news and research and stuff and maybe 75% of the time I end up spending a lot of time reading and thinking about something without making a video about it for one reason or another, and sometimes it’s because it’s just not a big enough story, but to be honest I’m getting a little tired of big stories. We live in interesting times, and it sucks. So screw it, I’m going to talk about this little story.
A few days ago, a post from someone I don’t follow landed in my social media feed. It was someone reposting a Guardian article headlined “Harry Potter fans force relocation of £430m undersea cable to avoid Dobby’s ‘grave,’” with the added comment, “For some reason people lose all critical judgment when interpreting jokes made by infrastructure people at conferences or on a podcast. This just isn’t what happened.”
Now, the idea of a trusted mainstream news source writing an entire article about something that did not happen is like catnip to me. Beccanip. So I immediately clicked through to read the article, bearing in mind that someone was authoritatively claiming it was all based on a joke.
The article concerns the Greenlink interconnector, a project that connected a power cable between the National Grid in Wales to Ireland, allowing more efficient sharing of energy between people separated by a channel of water. The story goes that Simon Ludlam, who was in charge of the project as the head of contractor Etchea Energy, was on BBC Wales explaining the proposed layout, which on the Welsh side would go through Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire. When the camera panned over the area he was talking about, careful viewers noted that the cable would, in fact, travel straight through Dobby’s grave.
Now, spoiler alert for a 15-year old children’s movie: apparently, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, a disgusting homunculus named “Dobby” dies and is laid to rest on a beach in Cornwall. Now, Cornwall is not in Wales, but thanks to a little Hollywood magic, Pembrokeshire stood in for it.
So, as Ludlam related on the Energy Revolution podcast, Harry Potter fans who saw his interview on the BBC petitioned him and his company to please, please, please change the location of the cable to avoid the weird dead muppet’s final imaginary resting place. And they did, and that’s how “Harry Potter fans force(d the) relocation of (a) £430m undersea cable.”
Because mainstream journalists would die rather than simply link to a podcast episode, I quickly searched for the Energy Revolution podcast, and luckily it was the most recent episode.
I’ll start with the important news: it wasn’t a joke. I don’t know why that guy on Bluesky said it was, and I don’t know why hundreds of people liked and reposted him.
Energy Revolution is hosted by Sulaiman Ilyas-Jarrett, a “former government advisor at the UK Department for Energy and No10 Downing Street, and a Policy Fellow at the University of Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy.” And Simon Ludlam is, in fact, the founder and CEO of Etchea Energy. They’re both serious guys who know what they’re doing and don’t come across as being prone to just, you know, making shit up.
That said, maybe Ludlam DID make that story up as a way to, I don’t know, attract a bunch of good PR for his energy infrastructure company that is already doing important multi-million dollar government projects. Like, he might just be a weird fabulist who likes attention.
So, I started going down a rabbit hole where I was trying to find his original BBC interview but had VPN problems and was only able to find the written article about it from 2018, which does quote Ludlam and explains the project. I found a Change.org petition about protecting Dobby’s grave but that was from May of 2022, clearly in response to the National Trust that month begging fans to stop leaving old socks on a protected beach. I guess Dobby liked socks.
But that DID add credence to the fact that this IS a place that’s important for fans, and they are passionate enough about it to bother officials in order to protect it.
Literally while I was researching this, the New York Times published their take on it, which included additional verification from James O’Reilly, the chief executive of Greenlink, who seems to confirm that Dobby’s grave, along with the natural layout of the beach and dunes, determined the final positioning of the cable.
So yeah, it happened.
Hi, post-production Rebecca, here. Literally as I was waiting for this video to render, ANOTHER post dropped onto my social media feed insisting that this story is false. That post links to a newsletter called Today in Tabs, which in turn cites a “a random Reddit poster” (always a good sign) who says it’s not real because:
“this happened years ago. The consultation was in 2018, the cable was laid starting in 2022, it was tested at the end of 2024, and it’s been in use since the start of 2025.”
Yes. That timeline matches with what Ludlum said: it most mostly settled in 2018 which is when his BBC piece aired and then they adjusted things prior to the cable being laid in 2022. This is not evidence against it happening.
“The cable wasn’t dug into the top of the beach, it was drilled horizontally underground (point 7 here). This has evidently been the case since at least October 2018, and from what I can tell the route under the beach did not change between then and October 2021 when it was finalised.”
Yes, at landfall the cable was drilled horizontally to avoid disturbing the beach with trenches. The point, which Ludlum says quite clearly in the podcast, is that the “grave” was where the cable was meant to come up and out of the ground. That’s what they changed.
Then they quote another guy who had nothing to do with the project. Thanks, but I will continue to believe the guys who actually did the project, not people who couldn’t even be bothered to listen to the podcast. Okay, back to the video.
Why do so many people want to believe otherwise? Personally, I think that people were thrown by the headlines that say it’s a £430 million cable. We live in a cynical world that often prioritizes large corporations over people: they destroy our land and resources and they don’t seem to care. Why would someone running a half-a-billion-pound project give a shit about a made-up children’s story? But that’s kind of Ludlam’s point in the interview, which I will now at last play for you.
Ludlam had never heard of Dobby before, but he and his partner listened to people who cared very deeply about it, including (and probably especially) children. They were already routing around Bronze Age artifacts, which another group of people care deeply about but, let’s be honest, probably isn’t as important as making sure people have affordable and sustainable energy–why not take an extra few days to also consider the feelings of a ten-year old girl, if all it means is maybe moving your cable ten feet to the side?
I think I’ve made it very clear that I couldn’t give two shits about Dobby, or Harry Potter. Those books were published after I was already an adult, and I just don’t read books for kids. And these days, I think it’s unethical to monetarily support the author of those books, who as we all know is a hateful ghoul whose transphobia has turned her brains into pudding. But the stories resonated with kids, with their parents, and with adults, and they’re having fun paying tribute to that. I think it’s actually very sweet that these guys listened and put in a tiny bit of effort to respond, and it makes me feel good that Ludlam is sharing this story as an example of how they view projects moving forward: by thinking about how their work affects those around them and trying to be compassionate even if they can’t necessarily relate. If more people thought that way, we’d have fewer construction projects disrupting indigenous culture’s heritage sites, for example. Mount Rushmore would still look like a cool mountain.
All that said, I do agree with the National Trust that people should respect the actual habitat where the “grave” sits. No one wants to pull an old sock out of the throat of a choking seabird. And it really can’t be said enough, but fuck JK Rowling, that bigoted old hag.
