Lion's Mound

This guide to the Lion's Mound outside Brussels opens with the Duke of Wellington's return to the battlefield in 1827, stunned to find a forty-three-meter hill where his defensive line once stood. It traces the mound back to 1815, when a musket ball wounded the Prince of Orange on this very spot, and to the king who ordered earth piled up by the hundreds of thousands of cubic meters in his honor. Along the way it takes on the popular legend about the iron lion crowning it, and what actually happened in a foundry in 1826. Climb the steps and see the view Wellington once fought over.