An enthusiastic traveller, Byron met his friends the Shelleys in Geneva in 1816. It was one evening, while entertaining themselves by making up ghost stories, that Mary Shelley was to invent her character of Frankenstein. Byron and the Shelleys walked around Lake Geneva, following Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s itinerary and visited the Château de Chillon which inspired his famous poem “The Prisoner of Chillon”. On several occasions he stayed at the Hotel Byron in Villeneuve.

After a long creative period, Byron had come to feel that action was more important than poetry. He armed a brig and sailed to Greece to aid the Greeks, who had risen against their Ottoman overlords.

However, before he saw any serious military action, Byron contracted a fever and died in Missolonghi on 19th April 1824.