Dungeness ruins south of Sea Camp

Using Sea Camp -- the island's only developed campsite -- as a base, we spent three days variously hiking, swimming, fishing and relaxing. One of my friends told me not to look to the right as I passed over the dunes and onto the beach for the first time the afternoon I arrived. Looking north (left) when I got there, I saw a wide expanse of beach with no cars or asphalt and just a few people enjoying the day.

To the right, I saw the unsightly pulp mill my friend was referring to on the horizon. There are two such mills located on Amelia Island, Florida, which is just south of Cumberland Island. The smell was not wafting over to Cumberland but the mills, with smoke billowing into the air from their gray stacks, were out of place with the otherwise pristine look of Cumberland Island.

The beach was so pleasant I quickly forgot about the mills. The water temperature was ideal, and the waves were big enough to hold a pretty competitive bodysurfing contest that the author ran away with.

On the second day, we went on a hike to the Dungeness ruins south of Sea Camp. The history of Dungeness dates to James Oglethorpe, founder of the Georgia colony, who built two forts and a hunting lodge he called Dungeness on the island in 1736. In 1783, Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene acquired nearly 11,000 acres (4,400 hectares) of the island in exchange for a bad debt. His widow built her own Dungeness house in 1803, which burned in the middle of the century.

In 1881 Thomas Carnegie (brother and partner of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie), with his wife Lucy, built yet another Dungeness on the foundation of the Greene estate. This Dungeness was built in 1885 and lasted until 1959, when much of it burned. The ruins remain, though, and include what is called Tabby House, the oldest house on Cumberland Island and the only building the Carnegies spared when they rebuilt the area from the ruins of the Greene estate. The house was built around 1800 of tabby, a kind of concrete made of oyster shells, lime and sand. Tabby construction can be seen throughout Georgia's coast.

As you walk down what would have been the main sand "driveway" into the estate, you see the main house before you, well intact from the foundation but mostly gutted by the fire. The building is large and majestic and you get the sense, as you walk the sprawling grounds, that Dungeness was at one time a beautiful home.

The only place I saw the feral horses on the island was at Dungeness. They were all over the grounds, quietly grazing and seemingly unconcerned with visitors. There have been attacks on humans by the horses but the Park Service points out that if you leave them alone and don't try to feed them, they will leave you alone. Due to overgrazing, many of the horses are not particularly healthy and a ranger told me that the Park Service will have to reduce their numbers to stabilize the population.

From Sea Camp dock, the best way to get to Dungeness is by the River Trail, a nice, wooded trail that ends at Dungeness dock. Near the dock is the Ice House Museum, the original storehouse for big blocks of ice taken to the island by schooner for the Carnegies in the days before refrigeration (when ice-making became common at the turn of the century, the Ice House was used as a storage area). Inside, artifacts and historical information offer good background on the island and the area around Dungeness known as the historical district. The ruins are on your right after a short walk east from the Ice House museum and down a sand road.

An old cemetery and abandoned, Carnegie-era rusty cars that are overgrown with weeds add to the timeless feel as you continue past the Dungeness ruins on the way to the beach. Walking north up the beach will take you back to the path which leads to Sea Camp. The entire loop is 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) and makes for a nice afternoon jaunt because you get a sense of the history of the island and also cover the three main geographical regions on Cumberland: saltwater marsh, maritime forest and, of course, the beach.