Historians are cursing Harry Potter fans who complained about a power cable project that was due to be built under the fictional resting place of Dobby the House Elf (above).

Instead, the new £430 million cable project will now be built close to human remains and artefacts that date back to the Bronze Age, over 3,000 years ago.

Spoiler alert, in case you don’t know – loyal elf Dobby dies in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and in the film version, Harry and his wizard friends bury him at Freshwater West beach in Wales. The Greenlink cable project, which will link Ireland to the National Grid with 190km (118 miles) of underwater pipes, was planned to pass through the site.

Even though Harry Potter isn’t real, fans were upset at the idea of Dobby being disturbed.

“We got hundreds of calls – I mean, hundreds,” the project manager Simon Ludlam told the Energy Revolution podcast. “I said: ‘Who’s Dobby? I don’t know Dobby. He’s a fictitious character in a fictitious book, the whole thing is fictitious.’” However, a colleague told him how strongly Potter fans felt about it, so planners drew up a new route for the cables.

In tribute to Dobby, fans of the series visit the beach to leave colourful stones and messages for him. Over the years, this has upset the National Trust, which owns the land, because it says the beach is environmentally fragile.

Village under strain from Hogwarts train

The residents of the Scottish village of Glenfinnan shared their frustrations with Harry Potter fans last week, too.

The village of 150 people is close to the famous viaduct used in the films by the Hogwarts Express steam train.

The viaduct attracts more than 660,000 visitors a year, and locals have complained about visitors clogging roads with traffic, being rude and even pooing at the side of the road. One man told The Times newspaper: “This place is not built to sustain these kinds of numbers of tourists. It’s dangerous. I can’t really take my dog through the village or things like that any more.”