In Byron’s Shadow: A Pilgrimage to Newstead Abbey

In this essay, Emre Aracı reflects on his journey to Newstead Abbey—the ancestral home of Lord Byron—not merely as a visit to a historic house, but as a personal pilgrimage and quiet reckoning with the enduring spirit of Romanticism. Beneath the Abbey’s brooding Gothic façade and along the stillness of its lake, he discerns not the silence of the past, but its eloquence: the lingering presence of Byron, whose verses once gave voice to longing, exile, and the pursuit of beauty in a disenchanted world. Aracı traces the poet’s influence beyond literature, into the music of Berlioz, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, and Rossini, each of whom responded—whether overtly or in spirit—to Byron’s melancholic heroes.

There are moments when, weary of the unrelenting noise of the modern world, we seek to reawaken the deeper sentiments instilled in us over time—through pages of history and biography, from lines encountered in a Romantic poem or a passage within a long-cherished novel, or through the soaring arc of a symphony that once stirred our soul. If, in such moments, we wish not only to summon these feelings anew but also to cleanse the self, if only briefly, of the clamour of earthly concerns, then I have always believed that a conscious pilgrimage to historic places can offer precisely such a renewal of spirit.

Byron's Newstead Abbey (photo © Emre Aracı)

It was with this belief that I resumed my journey through England’s Midlands, having last shared my impressions of the Chatsworth estate in Derbyshire. I now find myself further east, in Nottinghamshire, at Newstead Abbey, once the ancestral home of Lord Byron (1788–1824), that restless luminary of English Romanticism. As its name suggests, Newstead was originally an Augustinian priory, later transformed into a stately home. And yet, its very stones seem still to echo with something of the monastic, the Gothic, and the melancholically sublime—a dwelling wholly suited to the temperament of its most celebrated inhabitant. 

There is a peculiar enchantment here, the sense that Byron never truly left. One of my favourite Turkish poets Yahya Kemal, too, evoked this spectral presence in his poem Açık Deniz (Open Sea):

"Kalbimde vardı Byron’u bedbaht eden melâl /

Gezdim o yaşta dağları, hulyâm içinde lâl..."

"That melancholy which made Byron desolate was in my heart;

I roamed the mountains at that age, my dreams struck dumb..."

Lord Byron by Thomas Phillips

With those lines, he offered a tribute not only to the spirit of Byron, but to the yearning for a beauty and poetry long vanished from our own time. Byron, unable to find in his age the ideals he sought, created them instead in his verse—becoming, in the process, a beacon to countless artists then and since. And as I stood before the ivy-clad walls of Newstead, its lakes and lawns bathed in late afternoon light, I could not help but feel that he still lingers within, waiting—silently and eternally—to receive the traveller who listens.

Founded around the year 1170 by King Henry II, the Priory of St Mary at Newstead followed the fate of so many religious houses in England when, in the sixteenth century, Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church. The priory was dissolved and sold, its sacred lands passing in 1540 into the hands of the Byron family. Though parts of the monastic complex were lost to time, its majestic Gothic west front—still overlooking the lake—remained, a solemn ruin now joined to the evolving structure of a stately home. Over the centuries, the Byron family transformed what was once a place of quiet devotion into a romantic abode, where the spirit of the medieval lived on, reimagined in the pointed towers and castellated outlines of the adjoining residence.

Newstead Abbey by Thomas Allom

And it was here, amidst these haunting remnants of the past, that a young poet of noble lineage would one day dream. Within walls once echoing with the prayers of canons, the verses of Lord Byron would take form—verses steeped in yearning, heroism, and a profound sense of exile. This ancestral setting, with its cloistered beauty and brooding landscape, surely played its part in shaping the poet’s imagination, impelling him towards distant, sunlit shores, in pursuit of freedom, adventure, and glory. Byron wrote in the third canto of Don Juan (88):

"But Words are things, and a small drop of Ink,

Falling like dew upon a thought, produces

That which makes thousands, perhaps Millions, think;

‘Tis strange, the shortest letter which Man uses

Instead of Speech, may form a lasting link

Of Ages; to what straits old Time reduces

Frail Man, when paper – even a rag like this,

Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his".

It was, indeed, those very letters—capable of spanning the centuries—that brought me here on that quiet afternoon. And perhaps it is they, carried anew on the page you now read, that shall lead other pilgrims in time to come to Newstead Abbey, drawn by the enduring resonance of a poet's voice.

Entrance to Newstead Abbey (photo © Emre Aracı)

That day, after alighting from the bus on Mansfield Road, I passed between the ornate stone gate pillars—erected in 1862—that mark the entrance to Newstead and found myself on a winding path that meandered gently through woodland. Accompanied by birdsong and the rustle of trees, I walked for some twenty minutes through the emerald tranquillity of the estate, the lake and house gradually revealing themselves ahead. There was a serenity in that approach, a kind of timeless hush that rendered the two centuries separating us from the Romantic world of Byron curiously irrelevant, as if one were not so much visiting the past as entering it.

Following the death of his great-uncle, the 5th Baron Byron, in 1798, ten-year-old George Gordon Byron inherited Newstead Abbey, thus becoming one of the youngest barons in England. Yet the estate, by then, had fallen into a sad state of disrepair. Its paintings and fine furnishings had long since been sold, dispersed during the secluded and rather austere tenure of the late baron. As a result, the house was let for a time, and young Byron lived with his mother at Burgage Manor in Southwell.

Sultan Mahmud II

It was there, some twenty years ago, that I too had occasion to stay one weekend, a guest in that very house where Lord Byron once resided. In its drawing room—beneath the same ceiling that once echoed with his voice—I had the privilege of presenting an illustrated concert, evoking his 1810 journey to Constantinople and the audience he was granted by Sultan Mahmud II.

So it was that, as I stood once more before the Gothic façade of Newstead and gazed into the lake where swans drifted across the still water, my thoughts turned to that concert, unbidden yet vivid. On that earlier visit I had seen the Abbey only from without, unable to cross its threshold. But now, at last, I ventured within—and in doing so, I found myself guided not by a docent, but by Byron’s own creations: Harold, Manfred, Don Juan. In the oak-panelled great hall and the chambers of this half-monastic, half-palatial dwelling, I tried to hear the echo of his footsteps, the whispered residue of verse.

“Dear reader,” writes Halil Köksel in the preface to his Turkish translation of Don Juan, “once you poke your nose into these pages, I swear you shall never escape! Don Juan is none other than Byron himself. This is no fiction—it is life rendered as poetry”. And he is not wrong, for the lines of Don Juan are not spun from mere fancy but from lived truth: from the very dreams Byron conceived under the roof of Newstead, from the journeys he would go on to undertake in life, never to return. The Abbey—sold in 1818 while he was already in exile in Italy—remained not only a physical anchor to his youth, but a symbol of all he had lost, and all he transformed into literature.

1826 edition of Don Juan, (image © British Library)

Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, published between 1812 and 1818, centres on a solitary figure—disillusioned by a purposeless world—who sets forth on a pilgrimage through foreign and unfamiliar lands, seeking to rediscover his life on a different plane of existence. More than mere fiction, the poem gives voice to the melancholy and quiet despair felt by a generation in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. It also marks the birth of a new literary archetype: the “Byronic hero”—a defiant spirit, proud and heroic, yet inwardly tormented and irretrievably alone, who stood in opposition to the empty conventions of his age.

Byron's bust at Newstead Abbey
(photo © Emre Aracı)

Such spirits have never belonged solely to one time or place. They arise in every age, but it was Byron’s poetry that, through its haunting music and aching candour, gave form to their feelings and offered them companionship. Childe Harold, in particular, played a singular role in inviting readers to embark on journeys not only across landscapes but within themselves. With an intimacy then rare in literature, Byron articulated the rift between Romantic ideals and the unyielding truths of the real world.

Indeed, his influence was not confined to the realm of letters. As Hector Berlioz would later recall in his memoirs—a volume I had the pleasure of revisiting last summer—he too had felt Byron’s presence while composing. “My idea was to write a series of orchestral scenes” Berlioz wrote, “in which the solo viola would be involved, to a greater or lesser extent, like an actual person, retaining the same character throughout. I decided to give it as a setting the poetic impressions recollected from my wanderings in the Abruzzi, and to make it a kind of melancholy dreamer in the style of Byron’s Childe Harold. Hence the title of the symphony, Harold in Italy”, (Translated by David Cairns, The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, Everyman’s Library, London, 2002, p. 216).

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by J. M. W. Turner, 1832 (© Tate Britain)

Berlioz also noted that, in the heat of the Roman summer of 1831, he would often seek refuge in the cool vastness of St Peter’s Basilica, where he sat alone reading Byron’s verse in silent communion. A year later, in 1832, the English painter J. M. W. Turner would exhibit at the Royal Academy a radiant Italian landscape, likewise inspired by Childe Harold. Such was Byron’s reach: through music, painting, poetry—through memory, exile, and aspiration—he continued to guide the steps of dreamers long after his own had faded.

Berlioz composed Harold en Italie in 1834 for none other than Paganini, and although the eminent musicologist Sir Donald Francis Tovey would later assert that there existed no clear thematic link between Byron’s poem and Berlioz’s symphonic work, it remains beyond doubt that the French composer had deeply identified himself with both Byron and his introspective hero, Harold.

Over half a century after its première, Berlioz conducted Harold en Italie in Moscow and St Petersburg. Among those present was the Russian critic Vladimir Stasov, who, inspired by the performance, penned a dramatic outline for a symphonic work based on Byron’s Manfred. He sent his text to Mily Balakirev, who in turn forwarded it to Berlioz. Yet the ageing composer, in declining health, regretfully declined the project. The idea, however, would not fade. In 1882, Stasov’s libretto reached the hands of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Iosif Kotek and Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky, too, at first rejected the proposal—perhaps out of deference to Robert Schumann, who had already composed incidental music to Manfred in 1848. And yet the seed had been planted, and it would not be long before Tchaikovsky changed his mind. In November 1884, he journeyed to the Alpine town of Davos, in Switzerland, to visit his former pupil and close friend, the violinist Iosif Kotek, who was undergoing treatment for tuberculosis in a local sanatorium. Kotek, who had inspired the Violin Concerto, would tragically die only months later at the age of twenty-nine.

With him, Tchaikovsky had brought Byron’s Manfred—a fitting companion in such a place, for the Romantic poet himself had wandered these very heights. After departing Newstead Abbey never to return, Byron had taken up residence in 1816 at Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, traversing the Bernese Alps and pouring the sublime terror of those landscapes into the anguished musings of his metaphysical protagonist. Davos, with its stark and haunting vistas, and Byron’s brooding verse—mentioned by name in a letter Tchaikovsky wrote to Balakirev from there—quickly stirred the composer’s imagination. The result was the Manfred Symphony, completed between May and September of 1885, and premiered in Moscow on 3 March 1886. Tchaikovsky, in a gesture of homage, dedicated the work to Balakirev.

In his letter to Tchaikovsky dated 10 November 1882, Mily Balakirev outlined the conceptual framework of what would become the Manfred Symphony. For the first movement, he wrote: “Manfred wanders through the Alps. His life lies in ruins, yet he remains obsessively preoccupied with the questions that life could not answer. Nothing remains for him now but memories”. One cannot help but feel that these words take on a heightened resonance when contemplated against the spectral Gothic outline of Newstead Abbey reflected in its still lake, as in Arthur Spooner's 1944 painting hanging in the house.

Newstead Abbey by Arthur Spooner, (Nottingham City Museums & Galleries)

When Tchaikovsky finally composed Manfred, sixty-one years had passed since Byron succumbed to a fever in the Greek town of Missolonghi, where he had travelled to join the fight for the Greek independence. It was 19 April 1824; he was only thirty-six. The news of his death cast a pall over England. In London at the time, Gioachino Rossini responded with a lament—Il pianto delle muse nella morte di Lord Byron—for solo tenor, chorus, and orchestra. The manuscript score of this little-known elegy, in which the Muses weep for Byron, is preserved today in the British Library (MS 30246). Intriguingly, Rossini drew on thematic material from his opera Maometto II, a work based on the figure of Mehmed the Conqueror—an unusual yet oddly fitting intertextual gesture, given Byron’s fascination with the East.

Saatli Maarif Takvimi

Newstead Abbey has belonged to the City of Nottingham since 1931. On the afternoon of my visit, after lingering for some time before Byron’s bust in the garden, I began the half-hour walk towards the estate’s side gate, which leads to the charmingly modest single-platform Newstead railway station. As I strolled, I tried to listen more attentively to the poet himself. But it was not only Byron’s voice that echoed in my thoughts; I heard also the strains of Berlioz, of Schumann, of Tchaikovsky—and yes, even of Rossini, whose Muses may still be mourning.

And yet, on Tuesday, 27 September 2022—the very day I completed this article—I happened to glance, at the bottom of that most old-fashioned of calendars, the Saatli Maarif Takvimi, whose pages I turn each day. There, printed in small type beneath the date, I read these words attributed to Byron himself: “He who is busy has no time to weep”. It could not have been mere coincidence.

It was, I believe, the muses of that unforgettable day at Newstead Abbey—muses not of sorrow alone, but of gentle revelation—who arranged this unexpected epiphany. Just as I had felt on that sorrow-laden afternoon of 15 September 2022, walking towards Westminster Hall to join the queue and file past Queen Elizabeth II’s lying-in-state; it is often through such quiet, unforeseen miracles that life reminds us it still holds poetry—if only we pause to listen.

Emre Aracı’s article was originally published in Turkish under the title ‘Newstead Abbey’de Lord Byron’a Kulak Verirken’ in the November 2022 issue (No. 193) of Andante.

Link to the original article in Turkish

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