In a move that will surprise absolutely no one familiar with the intensity of fandom, Harry Potter enthusiasts have managed to reroute a £430 million undersea power cable, all to avoid disturbing the final resting place of a character who never actually existed. Dobby, the house-elf who met his end in the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is buried - in the cinematic sense - on Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales. Despite the National Trust, the actual landowner, pleading with fans not to leave tributes because the beach is ecologically sensitive, visitors continue to deposit stones that read "Here Lies Dobby."

The saga began when Simon Ludlam, project manager for the Greenlink interconnector, casually mentioned during a BBC interview that the 125-mile cable connecting the UK's National Grid to County Wexford, Ireland, would come ashore at Freshwater West. Within weeks, his office was inundated with calls. "We got hundreds of calls, I mean, hundreds of calls," Ludlam recounted on the Energy Revolution podcast. Initially baffled, he recalled asking, "Dobby, who's Dobby? I don't know Dobby? He's a fictitious character in a fictitious book, the whole thing is fictitious, what are you talking about?" A colleague assured him, "No it's very, very serious."

Apparently, it was. The company enlisted planners to devise a new route that would circumvent the fictional grave. "A lot of people were very happy about that, and the project is now going [ahead] and Dobby's happy," Ludlam said. In a delicious twist, the revised path ended up skirting some genuine Bronze Age burial urns - actual archaeological treasures - but, as Ludlam put it, "we avoided Dobby's grave." So, the cable now runs close to real ancient remains, but at least a CGI elf can rest in peace.