George Gordon Noel Byron was the son of Captain John Byron (nicknamed 'Mad Jack') and Catherine Gordon. He lived in Scotland for the first 10 years of his life, and developed a great love of the Highlands landscape. When he inherited his title from his great-uncle, Lord William Byron (nicknamed 'the Wicked Lord' and 'the Devil Byron'), he and his mother moved to England.
He had inherited the Newstead Abbey estate but the house was in too poor a state of repair for Byron and his mother to live there in 1798. Henry Edward, nineteenth Baron Grey of Ruthin, rented the estate for £50 a year from 1802. When he moved out in 1808, Byron moved in and decided that he would restore it, despite being heavily in debt at the time. He had a monument built in the ruined abbey to commemorate his favourite dog, Boatswain, a Newfoundland which had died that year.
Byron sold the Newstead estate in 1818 to an old schoolfriend, Thomas Wildman, after leaving Britain in 1816 to live in Venice.