As Eric Cubbage has recounted, Edinburgh's "night watchmen were amazed at the sight of him lighting his pipe from one of the streetlamps on North Bridge without even standing on tiptoe.

He was the toast of the town; a 6 May 1782 newspaper report stated: "However striking a curiosity may be, there is generally some difficulty in engaging the attention of the public; but even this was not the case with the modern living Colossus, or wonderful Irish Giant.

"[citation needed] His gentle, likeable nature inspired an immense public fondness, and his celebrity life was constantly splashed across the newspapers of the day.

[10] "The wonderful Irish Giant... is the most extraordinary curiosity ever known, or ever heard of in history; and the curious in all countries where he has been shewn, pronounce him to be the finest display of Human nature they ever saw".

[10] Byrne's great height was the result of a then-undiscovered growth disorder, known today as acromegaly or acromegalic gigantism, and his health declined sharply in his twenty-second year.

The loss of his earnings exacerbated his failing health, and two months later Byrne died, at his lodgings at Cockspur Street, Charing Cross, London, on 1 June 1783, aged 22.

He made express arrangements with friends that when he died his body would be sealed in a lead coffin and taken to the coastal town of Margate and then to a ship for burial at sea.

"[17] The BMJ article was widely reported and the resulting swell of public support for the campaign forced The Royal College of Surgeons to formally consider whether it should release Byrne's skeleton, the showpiece of their Hunterian Museum, in February 2012.

In May 2015, the then Mayor of Derry, Martin Reilly, wrote to the museum's trustees advocating for "the importance of respecting the wishes of Mr Byrne in relation to his burial".

[10] In March 2017, Dr. Thomas Muinzer appeared in an interview on the NPR programme All Things Considered for a piece entitled "The saga of the Irish Giant's Bones dismays Medical Ethicists".

[19] On 6 June 2018, speaking on behalf of the campaign, Muinzer published an article in The Conversation entitled "Why a London museum should return the stolen bones of an Irish giant"[20] as a result of recent developments with the case.

In 2010, poet Moyra Donaldson from Northern Ireland published the anthology Miracle Fruit which featured a poem inspired by Charles Byrne called 'The Skeleton of the Great Irish Giant'.

Author Tessa Harris made him one of the main characters in her novel The Dead Shall Not Rest, which examines the beginnings of forensic science, anatomy and surgery.

"[28] On 2017, Irish songwriter Seamus Fogarty released a song about Byrne - "A Short Ballad for a Long Man", with a video by Kieran Evans.