In 1802, Maria Nugent went with her husband, the Governor, on a tour of Jamaica. Accompanied by Simon Taylor, they arrived at a property called the Moro in the parish of St Thomas in the East. The Moro was set high on a hill, and the party approached it ‘up a steep road, with a precipice on one side’. Maria wrote that she was ‘almost terrified out of my little wits’ but ‘made up my mind there was no danger’, as she was ‘mounted on an old quiet horse’ that knew the track well. The horse belonged to John Scott, a member of the Jamaican Privy Council and owner of the Hordley sugar estate, to which the Moro was attached. Once they had negotiated the ascent, the Nugents arrived at ‘a good house, situated on the pinnacle of a mountain’, from where they could look out over the Plantain Garden River valley all the way down to the Caribbean Sea. This is how Maria described the view:

Nugent was looking for poetry and the picturesque, but as she looked out from the Moro over the Plantain Garden River valley she was viewing a landscape shaped by the prosaic activity of making money.