• Pause at the viewpoint terrace, viewpoint map and the Peachy Stone...   ///bound.ruler.flames

The views are mapped on a bronze plate on the wall overlooking the Church Fields. George Gordon Byron (1788 - 1824), a leading Romantic poet was a frequent visitor to this viewpoint as a Harrow schoolboy (1801 - 1805). Here he often sat dreaming by his favourite tombstone" (the “Peachy Tomb"), recorded in the poem shown nearby on a memorial erected by the son of one of Byron's school friends in 1905. See a copy of this poem by clicking "Lines Written beneath an Elm in the Churchyard of Harrow", The Elm itself burnt down sometime before 1935.

Amongst his best-known works are ‘She Walks in Beauty’, ‘When We Two Parted’, and ‘So, we'll go no more a roving’, and the narrative poems ‘Childe Harold's Pilgrimage’ and ‘Don Juan’. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and is still widely read throughout the world.

Byron's life was filled with aristocratic excesses, love affairs, huge debts, and a self-imposed exile. He served as a regional leader of Italy's revolutionary organisation, the Carbonari, in its struggle against Austria. Later he fought against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died from a fever contracted in Greece.