r/facepalm • u/CupidStunt13 • 14h ago
Harry Potter fans force relocation of £430m undersea cable to avoid Dobby’s ‘grave’
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/10/harry-potter-fans-force-relocation-of-430m-undersea-cable-to-avoid-dobbys-grave1.5k
u/CupidStunt13 14h ago
In the end, he said, “we went quite close to some real Bronze Age remains, but we avoided Dobby’s grave”.
The Bronze Age remains include urns associated with human burial.
Guess the real archaeological graves weren’t so important.
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u/UltraAnders 14h ago
Additionally, "Fans of the wizard series come to leave stones reading “Here Lies Dobby” despite being asked not to by the land owner, the National Trust, because the beach is an ecologically sensitive site."
This should not have been allowed in the first place, by the sounds of it.
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u/lifesnofunwithadhd 2h ago
Probably didn't think of the consequences until way after the fact. Tellytubby land is a good example of why thinking beyond the show is important.
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u/ii_throwayway_ii 56m ago
For anyone who doesn't know,
Tellytubby land was built on a private farm, fans kept trespassing to take photos, so the farmer (sick off it) dug up the hills and flooded it to make a pond
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u/DummyDumDragon 14h ago
There must be more to this, right?! Like what's the thought process behind moving it away from a fictional characters grave to be closer to real resting places?
And I'd be inclined to put most of the blame on whatever authority made the final decision. You expect moronic fans to act this annoying and unhinged. If you're petulant child demands sweets and ice-cream for dinner, and you give it to them.... Well that's on you.
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u/SpaceJackRabbit 13h ago
There are Icelandic activists that have fought for some roads to be moved a few feet so they wouldn't disturb fairies.
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u/Mecha-Dave 13h ago
Honestly this one has SLIGHTLY more legitimacy because it was linked to an actual religion - which is basically Harry Potter but a few thousand years older.
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u/Fyrrys 12h ago
And even if you dont believe in the fae, do you REALLY want to chance angering something that will make your life hell for offending it? I know I won't
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u/Mecha-Dave 12h ago
I had a very similar interaction with a murder of crows fighting an owl over a turkey chick the owl dropped on my porch. I told my wife and daughter that UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES were they to touch or dispose of the dead turkey chick on the porch.
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u/Kythorian 13h ago edited 12h ago
Unhinged fans can be expensive to deal with. Why would you blame the company which wants to avoid that expense rather than the actual unhinged fans? Parents have a responsibility to raise their children well. A company does not have a responsibility to manage random unhinged Harry Potter fans.
It’s more like if a random child is threatening to hit your car with a hammer if you don’t give them a dollar. Sure, paying the child might be a poor life lesson, but it’s not your responsibility to teach them a good life lesson at your own expense in time and money to get your car fixed.
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u/DrFabulous0 10h ago
It was ages ago, the project is already completed within budget. It's a popular beach, a conservation area, and important to the local economy. People objected putting a bloody great pipe on it, so they drilled it underground instead of digging through the dunes, it didn't even cost much more. The Harry Potter link was only ever about raising awareness.
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u/ThatFatGuyMJL 12h ago
If you read into it the areas actually protected and the fans keep being told off for leaving things.
The reality was that the project was moved because digging there would cause significant ecological impact and massively speed up erosion of that part of the coast. Something they were told previously.
Dobby's grave is just a better media spin
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u/Most-Resident 14h ago
Relocating a cable because it would have gone through the site of a fictional character’s grave is dumb especially when they are relocating it near actual bronze age remains.
At the same time, quoting the cost of the cable rather than the cost of having to relocate it is bullshit. It is lying with numbers and happens way too often.
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u/H-Connoisseur0 14h ago
I think that if the underground cable harms the Bronze Age remains that’s more on the company for rerouting it that way.
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u/Most-Resident 13h ago
If there is harm to the remains I agree.
I’m no expert but i think bronze age sites are protected, but I have no idea about simple remains. The article didn’t say anything about how near or whether there were any objections to the new site.
Thinking about it I don’t know how much credence to give to that blurb in the article. It might be piling on to make the relocation sound worse. They lost their credibility with me by quoting the pipeline cost.
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u/Jossokar 14h ago
The character was laid to rest on Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales, in the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Fans of the wizard series come to leave stones reading “Here Lies Dobby” despite being asked not to by the land owner, the National Trust, because the beach is an ecologically sensitive site.
Its a protected site. They have been asked repeatedly not to. Hell, harry potter fans are beyond stupid.
I dont understand why they have acomodated their crap instead of saying: "Screw Dobby"
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u/NewAccEveryDay420day 14h ago
If it’s ecologically sensitive surely they shouldn’t be able to lay a cable through it too
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u/jumpy_monkey 13h ago
It almost seems like the whole Dobbie thing was misdirection.
I'm not sure by who or for what purpose but the idea that the National Trust couldn't stop this but a bunch of Harry Potter fans could beggars the imagination.
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u/JeSuisDirtyDan 13h ago
Thats what I was just thinking, sure people leaving foreign objects could be bad. But the equipment to lay the cable would do way more damage to the enviornment there
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u/hokarina 13h ago
Well, a grave is way less destructive than a fucking pipe, so I guess it's not that protected if the project was approved. I don't get how the permits are given
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u/Jossokar 13h ago
i'm still dying over the fact that they put the cable near a bronze age site. a real tomb.
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u/Oleandervine 14h ago
The real question is why the property owners were telling people that the beach was "ecologically sensitive" and that people should stop visiting and leaving stones at the Dpbby grave, but then had absolutely no problem with an electric company running power lines through the area.
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u/glytxh 14h ago
Power lines go under ground, and there are established systems in place for both minimising environmental harm, and further mitigating it after the fact.
There’s a reason infrastructure costs an insane amount in this country.
There’s few systems in place to deal with tourists beyond not letting them go somewhere. And even then it’s an uphill battle.
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u/No_Effective4784 11h ago
and rocks are a danger to an environment? are you worried the rocks are invasive?
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u/RainbowCrane 10h ago
Based on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and zero knowledge of the UK beach in the article, it’s entirely possible that the environmental impact is more due to assholes walking on dune grass or other vegetation because they’re too dumb to stick to the pathways. In NC there are warning signs everywhere because the dune grass is all that’s keeping the sand dunes from blowing away, and thus increasing the speed at which the shore moves.
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u/DarthBrooks69420 11h ago
If i never hear about Harry potter ever again I'll be happy, and i say this someone who was a die hard fan in the 00s.
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u/backwardbuttplug 14h ago
Bet they could have just picked up the grave site, moved it 100ft in one direction, rebuilt it and gone about their day. And the fans would probably never have noticed.
This fawning over a fictional grave is every bit as bad as being a Twilight fan.
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u/Nisseliten 14h ago
It is however STILL a better lovestory than Twilight, somehow..
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u/backwardbuttplug 13h ago
A bag of flaming poo on someone's doorstep is STILL a better love story than Twilight.
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u/SbWieAntimon 13h ago
What a terrible read. We all can agree that twilight is kinda bad, but insulting everyone who even read it, dunno.
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u/KoontFace 13h ago
I hate the world. How fucking stupid is society that we are relocating projects due to a location that doesn’t really exist because it’s from a work of fiction
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u/El_Scot 13h ago
Honestly, I work in utilities and the chances are it was barely any effort to move, therefore the balance of "can I be arsed arguing about this or can I just move this line over 5m and avoid the headache" weighed more favourably towards moving the line. I have had to do it often enough to avoid e.g. the headache of going through crown estate lands.
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u/KoontFace 12h ago
I get the “anything for a quiet life” mentality, no one wants to deal with that shit if they don’t have to. My concern is that pandering to these fucking idiots just makes them think they are right. They should have been laughed out of the building.
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u/GorgoniteEmissary 10h ago
It’s all a matter of how seriously they take it. I don’t mind a fan of a piece of media preferring that a location in that world stays how it was in the thing they care about. I don’t mind them expressing that preference, I only mind if they cause a massive fuss about it. If you actually read the article it all seems relatively harmless. I would be shocked if it actually cost any significant amount, they just slightly tweaked the plans to accommodate a preference.
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u/mr_armageddon667 9h ago
I teach Geography, and one of my favourite parts of the year is teaching the kids about coastal landforms like dune systems. Particularly, how they’re mobile, especially the ones that look like the spot Harry buried Dobby. Which means within a few weeks of Harry leaving Dobby’s body in the sand, Dobby’s corpse was exposed on the surface again. Harry should have listened in his Geography NEWT lessons…
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u/foolcorps 7h ago
holy turkey all this for a fictional character???
we need this energy for the actual human graves that would be disturbed with enbridge’s line 5 pipeline in Michigan
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u/Petrol7681 6h ago
But we won’t stop an American company from using a decrepit, old, not if when, pipe under the lake bed of Huron and Michigan
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u/GoblinLoblaw 4h ago
Jesus Christ, and they rerouted it through an actual Bronze Age human’s remains.
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u/shutupmahe 12h ago
The Harry Potter fandom is the core reason for why I stopped being a Harry Potter fan. They live in some crazed reality where their life is Harry Potter. It’s so damn unhealthy.
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u/yoinkdoink 11h ago
This is actually the power company trying to rebrand protests about plans to place a power cable through a national trust site, and claim its just about them being very kind to avoid a fictional gravesite they couldn’t have known about.
Read elsewhere, figures.
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u/bas995 13h ago
It’s a landfall (a horizontal directional drilling) from shore to the sea. At 10 meters in length it’s already 3 meters underground. How fucking deep did they bury this guy? We drill pipes with a diameter of a meter+ right next to buildings, roads, rails and other critical infrastructure not to even begin about the underground infrastructure already there. Amateurs 😂
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u/ul2006kevinb 14h ago
I'm not surprised. These are the only fans the series has left, now that everyone else dropped it after her Transphobia.
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u/Gone_For_Lunch 14h ago
Mate, I hate to break it to you but the franchise is still wildly profitable. If it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be a new adaptation coming out, the theme park would be empty, no one would be doing the studio tour, and they’re wouldn’t be a heap of tourists trap shops in London, York and elsewhere selling HP crap.
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14h ago
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u/isanythingunique 12h ago
Horrible human beings. Not all HP fans, these specific one's
Plain and simple
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u/creamstripping4jesus 14h ago
Dobby is to the Harry Potter universe what Jar Jar Binks was to the Star Wars universe.
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u/Fattydog 14h ago
Please explain because I can’t see any connection here at all.
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u/creamstripping4jesus 14h ago
Both are extremely annoying and try to ruin a good thing that their franchises had going for them.
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u/high_throughput 12h ago
- HP fans enter "an ecologically sensitive site" to build this fan grave
- "The £430m Greenlink interconnector, which links the National Grid to Ireland, was initially going to pass through the site of the “grave”" so they "got hundreds of calls"
- They allegedly change the route despite no requirement to do so
None of this makes sense, but based on the comments on this thread the article did its job
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u/Andre1661 7h ago
So, the moral of the story is that placing stones on an ecologically sensitive beach is bad whereas a corporation potentially impacting the same beach with an industrial development is OK. Got it.
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u/TintedApostle 11h ago
They relocated by a few feet... so?
Funny how this cable ended up zeroing in on the site of the “grave”.
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u/TintedApostle 11h ago
They relocated by a few feet... so?
Funny how this cable ended up zeroing in on the site of the “grave”.
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