The Lion's Mound , lit. "Lion of Waterloo") is a large conical artificial hill located in the municipality of Braine-l'Alleud, Belgium. King William I of the Netherlands ordered its construction in 1820, and it was completed in 1826. It commemorates the location on the battlefield of Waterloo where a musket ball hit the shoulder of William II of the Netherlands (the Prince of Orange) and knocked him from his horse during the battle. It is also a memorial of the Battle of Quatre Bras, which had been fought two days earlier, on 16 June 1815.
The hill offers a vista of the battlefield, and is the anchor point of the associated museums and taverns in the surrounding Lion's Hamlet (French: le Hameau du Lion; Dutch: Gehucht met de Leeuw). Visitors who pay a fee may climb up the Mound's 226 steps, which lead to the statue and its surrounding overlook (where there are maps documenting the battle, along with observation telescopes); the same fee also pays for admission to see the painting Waterloo Panorama
A statue of a lion standing upon a stone-block pedestal surmounts the hill. Jean-François Van Geel (1756–1830) sculpted the model lion, which closely resembles the 16th-century Medici lions. The lion is the heraldic beast on the personal coat of arms of the monarch of The Netherlands, and symbolizes courage.
Its right front paw is upon a sphere, signifying global victory. The statue weighs 28 tonnes (31 tons), has a height of 4.45 m (14.6 ft) and a length of 4.5 m (14.8 ft). William Cockerill's iron foundry in Liège cast the lion, in sections; a canal barge brought those pieces to Brussels; from there, heavy horse-drays drew the parts to Mont-St-Jean, a low ridge south of Waterloo.
There is a legend that the foundry melted down brass from cannons that the French had left on the battlefield, in order to cast the metal lion. In reality, the foundry made nine separate partial casts in iron, and assembled those components into one statue at the monument site.
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