According to infrastructure guy Simon Ludlam on a recent podcast, the U.K.’s Greenlink Interconnector was rerouted after “hundreds of calls, I mean, hundreds of calls” from Harry Potter Adults who were angry that the power cable would allegedly disturb the fictional location of the fictional grave of Dobby, the fictional formerly enslaved elf who was offhandedly freed by the fantasy series’ dimwitted but wealthy protagonist as a sort of prank on his private school enemy’s family, and who subsequently suffered both the social rejection of his still-enslaved fellow elves and the continued indifference bordering on contempt of his human idol, Harry Potter, before ultimately being killed while heroically rescuing Potter and several of his fellow human slave owners. […]

It took a random Reddit poster in this week’s r/ukpolitics “weekly Rumours, Speculation, Questions, and Reaction megathread” to fact check a story that the British and American press and me and you and everyone we know deeply wanted to believe was true:

First of all, 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.

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.