> The National Trust, which owns the land, has previously warned pilgrims not to do so, as the area is ecologically sensitive, but it seems that people still do so.
Ah okay, laying a few stones is ecologically sensitive, but if a billion dollar company wants to dig up the entire beach for a cable, that's not a problem.
> Ah okay, laying a few stones is ecologically sensitive, but if a billion dollar company wants to dig up the entire beach for a cable, that's not a problem.
The billion dollar company is monitored by ecologists and other professionals to make sure they build things according to environmental impact laws and follow their permits (e.g., after digging, restoring the top soil, etc).
Randos moving and stacking stones, especially in large numbers, may alter habits for (small) animals and cause erosion:
You would think so but not the case for the construction of the controvsersial A69 highway in France.
Infractions are fixed through authorization change ...
Still, people laying stones seems way less invasive, then digging it all up. So yes, people will continue to be there and the digging is once, but the impact seems literally deeper.
When we're talking damage to a sensitive environment an ecologist would have the opposite answer to yours. If you dig up a natural environment you can't "plant seed" to reclaim it.
An ecologist would readily note that we do restoration work on damaged environments on a regular basis, so it is clearly possible to undo some level of damage. They'd also likely note that consulting an ecologist as part of the process might limit the damage in a way that a bunch of Harry Potter fans making a pile would not know.
Not doing anything might indeed be better for the environment alone in isolation, but has to be balanced with other considerations, like the benefits of a power cable carrying clean power from wind farms to replace coal.
It is also entirely possible to plant native, locally appropriate seeds in a reasonably natural fashion. I am obviously not proposing a layer of lawn sod.
Humanity collectively benefits by having electrical infrastructure so there can be more of us who can accomplish more things. I'm so sick of these effectively Original Sin arguments dressed up as pretending to care more about some fish or shore birds than about your fellow humans. I'm not sorry for existing, and I want lots of cheap power :)
There's some open space near my house with a fenced off area saying to stay on trail to protect the ecosystem, but of course oil and gas companies can drive their trucks through to setup fracking rigs.
I have literally never heard anyone associated with the environmental movement say:
"This area is ecologically insensitive. I'm not too worried what you do here."
Until they define some map or scale of what "ecologically sensitive" means, I put zero weight on that statement. It's meaningless. They say it about everything because it is their job to do so.
A common trick in mining is to send surveyors to an area they don’t want so the various interests just so happen to decide that the area being surveyed is the one with historical / ecological significance. After that has been established they send surveyors for the area they do want.
The ecological studies also cover the surrounding areas. They can’t say that absolutely everything is significant so to make the stronger case they pile the significance into the area they think is the likely site to be developed. Then the miners are ‘responding’ to the feedback by relocating to a less significant location that already has been ecologically studied and deemed insignificant.
I think here it's worth distinguishing between actually ecologically important, and the ability of campaigners to raise environmental arguments to try to prevent development when their underlying reason is something else (i.e. not wanting a nuclear plant in their back yard). There are definitely ecologically unimportant places in England, but it's almost certain that if you try to put a power station there somebody will raise an environmental concern anyway. This will probably eventually be dismissed, but you can gum up the works procedurally for a pretty long time.
I mean that's my point, if the campaigners are not willing to be honest about ranking the places they actually care about beforehand (and occasionally letting a project happen), I'm not going to listen to anything they do say.
You started here with "associated with the environmental movement". That's not the same as everyone campaigning on a local issue who puts "environmental issues" into their big list of why some local development shouldn't happen: most of those people aren't associated with the environmental movement at all.
I guess my point is that I think the problem is nimbies, not environmentalists, and since I think we need a faster and cheaper planning system in the UK I think it's important to identify the actual problem. Getting the Campaign to Protect Rural England or whoever to produce a ranking of places by importance does nothing if we still have a system where local residents can raise objections about building on locations at the bottom of the ranking and it takes forever to push something through.
Can you be more precise? Like an actual area on the map. Because when I look at England's map of greenbelt areas [1] literally everything around Birmingham is protected.
Green belt areas mostly are not markers of ecologically important areas. They're a planning tool that largely exists to prevent urban sprawl. A lot of the green belt area is unremarkable commercial agricultural land.
I think they were joking. In a literal sense, cities require green spaces for water management. Otherwise you end up like Chicago where they paved everything and flood constantly.
What we can say for certain is that the sole source of this claim is the project director for Greenlink, Simon Ludlam, and he made the claim as an anecdote on a podcast this week. The project's public consultations were in 2019.
Non-British people might also like to know that the UK news media is in what's called the silly season, where they run any old nonsense as news because Parliament is in recess, the MPs are on their holidays, and there's a dearth of serious announcements to cover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silly_season
It would not surprise me if it came up at some point in the long and tedious process of public consultations and planning permissions that such projects need to go through (basically anyone can write in to comment/object on such things for any reason), and it stuck in his mind enough to mention it, even if it didn't actually weigh into the decision about where the cable went.
If anyone wants to read dozens of PDFs, here are some of of Greenlink's planning applications for where the cable comes onshore at Freshwater West, including responses made to the planning committee:
The latter application includes a Archaeological Written Scheme of Investigation (WSI) which explains what needs to be done to avoid disturbing things of archeological importance. No mention of fictional elves in there, but I wasn't expecting any.
This is specifically with Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority, who are responsible for the beach. Pembrokeshire County Council have their own planning authority, e.g.:
> The fans’ resistance to having Dobby’s “grave” desecrated seemingly prevented the undersea cable from going through the area. It was instead rerouted in an area that was close to some Bronze Age remains and urns, which, ironically, are associated with human burial.
> instead rerouted in an area that was close to some Bronze Age remains and urns
To be fair, in the UK (and much of Europe) bronze age remains are everywhere. But there’s only 1 fictional Dobby grave.
Like farmers will regularly dig up a bronze age thingamabob while plowing a field. For example [1], [2]. There’s a story like this every couple of years.
while I do agree with this point, I want to point out that this isn't quite a fair comparison.
every single entity has (normally) a single (real) burial site. Us grouping many unknowns in one group, and comparing to a single specific one is not quite fair...
there is only one burial site of many other fictional characters including some other well known and beloved ones.
They didn't say the location contained them, just that it was associated with them, which obviously it is for at least some fraction of the population.
it's a nice change that a big company suffers the result of an "organic hallucination" brought on by people associating the location with a fictional event; how do we make this happen to AI companies?
I'm so tired of needing technical workarounds because of human stupidity. Exact same thing as the "age declaration" bullshit we see all over. Dig that trench, bury the cable, put the sand back, end of the story. Here in France we use public money to pay "experts" to ensure building wind turbines won't disturb the "natural energy highways" or some other bullshit before delivering the permit, they may even propose alternative locations for the turbine to disturb less the energies, bunch of lunatics.
It's difficult to explain shortly and I think it's a very local problem to France, but basically: in some regions, local branches of gov mandates bullshit experts to make sure the new wind turbines won't disturb some imaginary natural energy network. They call it "geobiology".
If only those sorts of problems were local to France.
They can call it what they want, I call it "paying off an industry to support the government" because that's essentially what it is. It's a make work project for whoever benefits and that industry will thereafter go to bat for the BS because they don't want the gravy train to stop.
Many fans have visited the beach to lay painted rocks, several crosses, and many socks in Dobby’s memorial. However, as the memorabilia has had a negative effect on the environment, the beach asks that visitors just interact with the site by taking photos.[4]
Note: there is currently no indication of this controversy in the article. Anyone who holds an account on Fandom could check through the history and diffs, for any revision since 2019 that would indicate someone tried to add information about the undersea cable or the alleged row.
Reminds me of this classic article from Michael Lewis:
> Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called "hidden people"-or, to put it more plainly, elves-in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, "we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people."
If it's a legal requirement to have the government check for hidden people before you do building, why do they need to hide the fact they did it? I'm not a Christian but I'm pretty sure I'd still need to deconsecrate a church before knocking it down
> I'm not a Christian but I'm pretty sure I'd still need to deconsecrate a church before knocking it down
What makes you think that? If you own it, it isn't a listed building, and zoning laws allow it, you can knock it down in most countries. I'm not sure that would be illegal anywhere.
Deconsecration is part of canon law for some religions. Whether you as an individual care about those or not is a personal matter. I doubt that there are many cases where the previous owner forgot to deconsecrate the church when they sold it off.
UK law can be quite intertwined with the church in a lot of cases, so I wouldn't want to confidently say this wouldn't turn up somehow. And churches are also pretty likely to be listed, anyhow. (It could also turn up as part of the planning permission which you do need for demolishing a large structure in the UK)
> The National Trust, which owns the land, has previously warned pilgrims not to do so, as the area is ecologically sensitive, but it seems that people still do so.
Ah okay, laying a few stones is ecologically sensitive, but if a billion dollar company wants to dig up the entire beach for a cable, that's not a problem.
> Ah okay, laying a few stones is ecologically sensitive, but if a billion dollar company wants to dig up the entire beach for a cable, that's not a problem.
The billion dollar company is monitored by ecologists and other professionals to make sure they build things according to environmental impact laws and follow their permits (e.g., after digging, restoring the top soil, etc).
Randos moving and stacking stones, especially in large numbers, may alter habits for (small) animals and cause erosion:
* https://www.ausableriver.org/blog/leaving-no-trace-rock-stac...
* https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/conservation...
* https://www.nps.gov/articles/rockcairns.htm
You would think so but not the case for the construction of the controvsersial A69 highway in France. Infractions are fixed through authorization change ...
https://france3-regions.franceinfo.fr/occitanie/tarn/albi/au...
Almost as if ecoologist are not listened to. What a surprise ...
Beaches are extremely dynamic environments and can heal in ways that other areas can't.
Still, people laying stones seems way less invasive, then digging it all up. So yes, people will continue to be there and the digging is once, but the impact seems literally deeper.
My yard got dug up to run a sewer line. They filled it in after and planted seed. I couldn't possibly tell you where it happened now.
If they'd left a big pile of rocks in the spot, I'd bet I could find that.
When we're talking damage to a sensitive environment an ecologist would have the opposite answer to yours. If you dig up a natural environment you can't "plant seed" to reclaim it.
An ecologist would readily note that we do restoration work on damaged environments on a regular basis, so it is clearly possible to undo some level of damage. They'd also likely note that consulting an ecologist as part of the process might limit the damage in a way that a bunch of Harry Potter fans making a pile would not know.
Not doing anything might indeed be better for the environment alone in isolation, but has to be balanced with other considerations, like the benefits of a power cable carrying clean power from wind farms to replace coal.
It is also entirely possible to plant native, locally appropriate seeds in a reasonably natural fashion. I am obviously not proposing a layer of lawn sod.
Humanity collectively benefits by having electrical infrastructure so there can be more of us who can accomplish more things. I'm so sick of these effectively Original Sin arguments dressed up as pretending to care more about some fish or shore birds than about your fellow humans. I'm not sorry for existing, and I want lots of cheap power :)
Maybe the company has at least made committments to restore it to the way it was after?
Yeah, isn't it crazy how that works?
There's some open space near my house with a fenced off area saying to stay on trail to protect the ecosystem, but of course oil and gas companies can drive their trucks through to setup fracking rigs.
I have literally never heard anyone associated with the environmental movement say:
"This area is ecologically insensitive. I'm not too worried what you do here."
Until they define some map or scale of what "ecologically sensitive" means, I put zero weight on that statement. It's meaningless. They say it about everything because it is their job to do so.
I'm guessing you also haven't asked. All places are very much not the same degrees of sensitive and important.
A common trick in mining is to send surveyors to an area they don’t want so the various interests just so happen to decide that the area being surveyed is the one with historical / ecological significance. After that has been established they send surveyors for the area they do want.
Why wouldn't those various interests just complain about the next area being surveyed? Why would they stop after the first?
The ecological studies also cover the surrounding areas. They can’t say that absolutely everything is significant so to make the stronger case they pile the significance into the area they think is the likely site to be developed. Then the miners are ‘responding’ to the feedback by relocating to a less significant location that already has been ecologically studied and deemed insignificant.
It costs political capital to do so.
If you say no 100% of the time, your work product won't be worth much.
OK. What are some ecologically unimportant places in England? Somewhere I could throw up a nuclear power plant without anyone raising a fuss.
I think here it's worth distinguishing between actually ecologically important, and the ability of campaigners to raise environmental arguments to try to prevent development when their underlying reason is something else (i.e. not wanting a nuclear plant in their back yard). There are definitely ecologically unimportant places in England, but it's almost certain that if you try to put a power station there somebody will raise an environmental concern anyway. This will probably eventually be dismissed, but you can gum up the works procedurally for a pretty long time.
I mean that's my point, if the campaigners are not willing to be honest about ranking the places they actually care about beforehand (and occasionally letting a project happen), I'm not going to listen to anything they do say.
You started here with "associated with the environmental movement". That's not the same as everyone campaigning on a local issue who puts "environmental issues" into their big list of why some local development shouldn't happen: most of those people aren't associated with the environmental movement at all.
I guess my point is that I think the problem is nimbies, not environmentalists, and since I think we need a faster and cheaper planning system in the UK I think it's important to identify the actual problem. Getting the Campaign to Protect Rural England or whoever to produce a ranking of places by importance does nothing if we still have a system where local residents can raise objections about building on locations at the bottom of the ranking and it takes forever to push something through.
City of London? Does it have much ecology left? Then again I suppose too many people would raise a fuss...
Slough
Swindon? They do have the magic roundabout.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon)
Birmingham?
Can you be more precise? Like an actual area on the map. Because when I look at England's map of greenbelt areas [1] literally everything around Birmingham is protected.
[1] https://www.cpre.org.uk/interactive-map-of-englands-green-be...
Green belt areas mostly are not markers of ecologically important areas. They're a planning tool that largely exists to prevent urban sprawl. A lot of the green belt area is unremarkable commercial agricultural land.
I think they were joking. In a literal sense, cities require green spaces for water management. Otherwise you end up like Chicago where they paved everything and flood constantly.
There is some skepticism about the veracity of this. Of course, be skeptical of the skepticism.
https://bsky.app/profile/dsquareddigest.bsky.social/post/3ms...
What we can say for certain is that the sole source of this claim is the project director for Greenlink, Simon Ludlam, and he made the claim as an anecdote on a podcast this week. The project's public consultations were in 2019.
The anecdote starts at 16m55s: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/can-we-connect-the-wor...
Non-British people might also like to know that the UK news media is in what's called the silly season, where they run any old nonsense as news because Parliament is in recess, the MPs are on their holidays, and there's a dearth of serious announcements to cover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silly_season
It would not surprise me if it came up at some point in the long and tedious process of public consultations and planning permissions that such projects need to go through (basically anyone can write in to comment/object on such things for any reason), and it stuck in his mind enough to mention it, even if it didn't actually weigh into the decision about where the cable went.
If anyone wants to read dozens of PDFs, here are some of of Greenlink's planning applications for where the cable comes onshore at Freshwater West, including responses made to the planning committee:
https://planning.agileapplications.co.uk/pcnpa/application-d...
https://planning.agileapplications.co.uk/pcnpa/application-d...
The latter application includes a Archaeological Written Scheme of Investigation (WSI) which explains what needs to be done to avoid disturbing things of archeological importance. No mention of fictional elves in there, but I wasn't expecting any.
This is specifically with Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority, who are responsible for the beach. Pembrokeshire County Council have their own planning authority, e.g.:
https://planning.agileapplications.co.uk/pembrokeshire/appli...
The whole story is absolute nonsense.
If you think this particular story about the dedication of some people to a fictional character from a book is nonsense, I've got bad news
> The fans’ resistance to having Dobby’s “grave” desecrated seemingly prevented the undersea cable from going through the area. It was instead rerouted in an area that was close to some Bronze Age remains and urns, which, ironically, are associated with human burial.
> instead rerouted in an area that was close to some Bronze Age remains and urns
To be fair, in the UK (and much of Europe) bronze age remains are everywhere. But there’s only 1 fictional Dobby grave.
Like farmers will regularly dig up a bronze age thingamabob while plowing a field. For example [1], [2]. There’s a story like this every couple of years.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/12/23/farmer-bronze-ag...
[2] https://allthatsinteresting.com/rhubodach-scotland-bronze-ag...
Since it’s a fictional grave, you can build it anywhere you want, as many times as you want.
But this is the one and only burial place pictured in the movie that people watched. You can't change that now.
while I do agree with this point, I want to point out that this isn't quite a fair comparison.
every single entity has (normally) a single (real) burial site. Us grouping many unknowns in one group, and comparing to a single specific one is not quite fair...
there is only one burial site of many other fictional characters including some other well known and beloved ones.
There’s another!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd1l6vm84d0o
TBF, human burial sites are a dime a dozen. There's relatively few locations associated with house elf remains.
None, to be precise.
They didn't say the location contained them, just that it was associated with them, which obviously it is for at least some fraction of the population.
While we're pedanting, I believe the location is where his death scene was filmed; he was buried somewhere else.
Because beaches are terrible places for graves, one good storm, the beach shifts and you've got to bury them all over again.
maybe go back and watch the movie; it shows Harry digging his grave slightly above the high tide line, same location.
If anyone doubts that popular media has at least somewhat taken the place of religion, here you go
it's a nice change that a big company suffers the result of an "organic hallucination" brought on by people associating the location with a fictional event; how do we make this happen to AI companies?
And made the cable reroute through a Bronze Age burial site too...
Spoiler alert geesh
This is a rehash of the Guardian article (submitted here yesterday with no traction), which should the the link:
Harry Potter fans force relocation of £430m undersea cable to avoid Dobby’s ‘grave’
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/10/harry-po...
I'm so tired of needing technical workarounds because of human stupidity. Exact same thing as the "age declaration" bullshit we see all over. Dig that trench, bury the cable, put the sand back, end of the story. Here in France we use public money to pay "experts" to ensure building wind turbines won't disturb the "natural energy highways" or some other bullshit before delivering the permit, they may even propose alternative locations for the turbine to disturb less the energies, bunch of lunatics.
What are you talking about ?
For the last point: https://www.franceinfo.fr/environnement/energie/energies-ren... (in French)
The associated pseudoscience has a wikipedia page too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geobiology_(pseudoscience)
It's difficult to explain shortly and I think it's a very local problem to France, but basically: in some regions, local branches of gov mandates bullshit experts to make sure the new wind turbines won't disturb some imaginary natural energy network. They call it "geobiology".
If only those sorts of problems were local to France.
They can call it what they want, I call it "paying off an industry to support the government" because that's essentially what it is. It's a make work project for whoever benefits and that industry will thereafter go to bat for the BS because they don't want the gravy train to stop.
We are not serious people.
Dobby dies?! Spoilers!
The cost of planning the alternative route hasn't been published anywhere yet AFAIK, although it's non-trivial to estimate.
https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Dobby's_grave
Note: there is currently no indication of this controversy in the article. Anyone who holds an account on Fandom could check through the history and diffs, for any revision since 2019 that would indicate someone tried to add information about the undersea cable or the alleged row.Reminds me of this classic article from Michael Lewis:
> Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called "hidden people"-or, to put it more plainly, elves-in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, "we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people."
https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2009/4/wall-street-on...
If it's a legal requirement to have the government check for hidden people before you do building, why do they need to hide the fact they did it? I'm not a Christian but I'm pretty sure I'd still need to deconsecrate a church before knocking it down
> I'm not a Christian but I'm pretty sure I'd still need to deconsecrate a church before knocking it down
What makes you think that? If you own it, it isn't a listed building, and zoning laws allow it, you can knock it down in most countries. I'm not sure that would be illegal anywhere.
Deconsecration is part of canon law for some religions. Whether you as an individual care about those or not is a personal matter. I doubt that there are many cases where the previous owner forgot to deconsecrate the church when they sold it off.
UK law can be quite intertwined with the church in a lot of cases, so I wouldn't want to confidently say this wouldn't turn up somehow. And churches are also pretty likely to be listed, anyhow. (It could also turn up as part of the planning permission which you do need for demolishing a large structure in the UK)
> I'm not a Christian but I'm pretty sure I'd still need to deconsecrate a church before knocking it down
I am a Christian and it would not occur to me that that was a thing. It's just a building.
Catholics have a ritual for it I think.
Ofcourse the really old churches are turned into monuments and they come with free dead people under the building. Can't do much with those.
I'm trying the imagine the scenario where the government official reports that elves have been found. On what evidence?
If you every get the chance, go visit Freshwater West… it's a beautiful part of the world
It is predicted that Binface will win by a landfill.
its undersea right, why would it matter ????
seeing the picture online seems that the grave would not be touched
its undersea until it arrives to the land it connects to
I doubt there is global data center on that grave