It commemorates the spot on the battlefield of Waterloo where the king's elder son, Prince William of Orange, is presumed to have been wounded on 18 June 1815, as well as the Battle of Quatre Bras, which had been fought two days earlier.

[3] The Lion's Mound was designed by the royal architect Charles Vander Straeten, at the behest of King William I of the Netherlands, who wished to commemorate the location on the battlefield of Waterloo where a musket ball hit the shoulder of his elder son, King William II of the Netherlands (then Prince of Orange), and knocked him from his horse during the battle, on 18 June 1815.

[6] Though tourism to the site had already begun the day after the battle, with Captain Mercer noting that, on 19 June 1815, "a carriage drove on the ground from Brussels, the inmates of which, alighting, proceeded to examine the field",[7] the monument's success only dates from the second half of the 19th century.

This huge man-made hill was constructed using 300,000 cubic metres (390,000 cu yd) of earth taken from the ridge at the centre of the British line, effectively removing the fields between La Haye Sainte farm and the southern bank of Duke of Wellington's sunken lane.

Victor Hugo, in his novel Les Misérables, wrote that the Duke of Wellington visited the site two years after the mound's completion and said, "They have altered my field of battle!

By taking from this mournful field the wherewithal to make a monument to it, its real relief has been taken away, and history, disconcerted, no longer finds her bearings there.

Where the great pyramid of earth, surmounted by the lion, rises to-day, there was a hillock which descended in an easy slope towards the Nivelles road, but which was almost an escarpment on the side of the highway to Genappe.

William Cockerill's iron foundry in Liège cast the statue 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.