Byng's fifteen extant diaries, covering the years 1781–94, describe his travels on horseback throughout England and Wales during twelve summers.

On 14 December 1812 he succeeded his elder brother, George Byng, 4th Viscount Torrington,[1] formerly HM Minister Plenipotentiary at Brussels, in the family titles but died before he had the opportunity of being introduced in the House of Lords.

The paternal seat of Southill Park had been sold by his elder brother for the repayment of debt, and Byng thus found himself titled but landless.

After this time he gave up his journeyings, feeling he was too old to cover so many miles on horseback with only a servant to accompany him and sometimes to ride on ahead to book the inn for the next night's stay.

On his travels Byng displays the training and attitude of a retired Army officer (subsequently, from 1782 to 1799, a Commissioner of Stamps) together with the intellectual outlook of an antiquary steeped from his schooldays in Shakespeare and in the classics of Greek and Roman antiquity.

Nor does he stay with his brother the 4th Viscount Torrington but rather at the Sun Inn at Biggleswade in Bedfordshire, which he calls his "country seat".

Like Turner in the Lake District, he uses his paintbrushes to sketch charming but somewhat naïve watercolour scenes, for example of Barfreston Church in Kent,[18] Greta Bridge[19] or the "tortur'd tree" at Bell Bar.

[25] He was a countryman at heart, far happier fishing and shooting than endeavouring to adapt himself to the airs and graces of polite London society, for which he had little affection.

Faithful to the established Church of England (although conscious of its imperfections), he had only limited sympathy with Methodism – while recognising its potential to rejuvenate traditional churchgoing.

He admired the silk-mills at Overton near Basingstoke,[28] the mining and the navigation tunnel at Sapperton in Gloucestershire,[29] and Josiah Wedgwood's potteries at Etruria, Staffordshire.

Partly because they were so often on his routes, there were four inns he especially liked: the Sun at Biggleswade, the Haycock at Wansford, the Ram's Head at Disley, and the Wheatsheaf at Alconbury (Hill).

[45] At the Sun Inn at Biggleswade Byng had not only his own parlour,[46] where he could eat privately, but was also provided with his own lockable chest of drawers (complete with "nightcap, shirts, fishing-tackle"[47]) and with grazing for his horse while he was in London.

The Grand Tour, a leisurely exploration of outstanding cultural features of the European Continent, was undertaken by many young men—though not by Byng himself—before and during the 1780s.

Byng, intensely patriotic, believed that there was just as much of interest in Britain as in France or Italy, particularly as England and Wales contained so much that was picturesque.

He writes in his Fragment of a diary of a Tour in Hertfordshire, June 1788:- Now I should be glad to ask of our Travellers, who brag of every country but their own, where they will find a cheaper charge than this [18/3d for 2½ days]; which was on a high road, [at South Mimms,] near the metropolis of Europe!

Talk not, therefore, gentlemen, of foreign parts, till you have seen and learnt something of your own country: – ye, who drive by Canterbury Cathedral, without deigning a look, and return boasting of rialtos, eclipsed by the work of the most ordinary Welsh masons.

“If my journals should remain legible, or be perused at the end of 200 years", he writes elsewhere,[61] "there will, even then, be little curious in them relative to travel, or the people; because our island is now so explored; our roads, in general, are so fine; and our speed has reach'd the summit".