Cumberland Island National Seashore is the largest and southernmost barrier island in Georgia offering visitors over 17 miles of secluded, white sandy beaches.
Cumberland Island achieved it's protected status as a National Seashore decades ago, ensuring that most of the island will remain in it's primitive state. No road or causeway from the mainland will ever be constructed. All island visitors must bring their own food and supplies and transport all their garbage back to the mainland.
We anchored north of the National Park Service Station and came ashore at the Sea Camp dock which also provides ferry service from the mainland. This is an excellent base from which to explore the island. It's an easy half-mile hike east to the beach, and a little more than a mile south to the ruins of Dungeness, a good spot for viewing some of the island's wild horses.
The horses which roam freely on Cumberland are ferel, meaning that their ancestors were once domesticated. Legend has it that they were originally brought to the island by the Spanish.
It is considered fortunate to encounter a family of wild horses grazing on the lawn, but apparently it didn't faze the horses or Bob one bit.
In the 1880's, Thomas M.Carnegie and his wife Lucy bought land on Cumberland for a winter retreat. In 1884, they began building a mansion on the site of Dungeness, though Carnegie never lived to see it's completion. Lucy and their nine children continued to live on the island. Dungeness was designed as a 59-room Scottish castle. They also built pools, a golf course, and forty smaller buildings to house their 200 servants. After the Crash and the Depression, the family left the island and kept the mansion vacant. It burned in a 1959 fire, believed to have been started by a poacher who had been shot in the leg by a caretaker weeks before.
This car graveyard catches Bob's attention.
Walking back among huge live oaks draped with Spanish moss, we were rewarded with the island's pristine natural beauty.
Another wonderful day on vacation.
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