fistem of a pound

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if you read just the guardian article, it sounds like something that is a) happening currently, and b) that the cable was actually in place when the changes were made.

neither of these things are true. this whole thing comes from a podcast episode which released recently, where simon ludlam talks a bit about the process of working on interconnector cables, and mentions that during the community consult phase of planning for the greenlink interconnector, in 2019, people sent in harry potter related complaints that led to them altering the cable location by a few metres. again, this was entirely in the planning phase, the cable had not yet been placed. he also makes it pretty clear that he is talking about it because he thought it was silly and a bit surreal, not because it was any huge imposition on the project.

the environmental impact statement for the greenlink cable is freely available online, and outlines much more serious issues with its placement due to environmental concerns, stating that "The shore crossing at Freshwater West would extend through sand dunes approximately 3m high at the northern extent. The sand dunes are environmentally sensitive areas and installation through this area would require environmental permitting."

now, is this situation ridiculous? of course! but it's not that hard to talk about it being ridiculous without resorting to clickbait and misinformation, and it's genuinely alarming to me how many people are sharing these headlines without questioning them in the slightest. in this particular case it doesn't really matter that much, but the normalisation of inaccurate, sensationalist headlines and fact poor articles that are at best under researched and at worst deliberately misleading is a dangerous trend.

"There's something weird going on with this Dobby pipeline story and I just cannot figure out what. I've seen so much discussion about it and there's just absolutely zero evidence for this actually happening aside from one little anecdote from a podcast.

It seems to have originated from this interview at 16:55 with Simon Ludlam, who was the project director for Greenlink. I've searched and searched and can't actually find any evidence of this interview he mentions, let alone any indication of there being backlash.

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.

The archaeological survey was done in 2019, and the commitments to not go close to any of the archaeological sites was made in October 2020. From what I can tell it was also offshore, so it was more about the routing before the beach.

And finally, the part that imo makes this whole thing nonsense - Dobby's grave is on the south side of Freshwater West, and right from the earliest proposals I've been able to find (page 63, October 2018) the interconnect has come in through the north side.

From everything I can tell, this story is just completely false and it's all stemmed from one guy's embellishing of the truth for an anecdote on a podcast.

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