Dungeness Ruins - Cumberland Island GA USA

I imagine it's totally illegal to do any searching here, but has anybody ever tried?  This site has so much history with the likes of the Lee's, the Carnegies, the Ogelthorps living there over 200 years, and the site burning down and being abandonded after a fire in the 1950's, there's got to be some historical treasure there, be it nothing but a stash of musket balls from Robert E. Lee or jewlery from one of the other occupants.

I've been to the island, and drool over the thought of detecting out there.  The grounds are massive.  17 acres of ruins and wildlife.  I've never ran into a Park Service employee while on the place, and just wonder how hard it would be to sneak a detector onto the island.  They only let about 40 people at a time on it and you rarely see another human, mostly wild turkeys and wild horses, so I think it'd be pretty easy to do some detecting there.  I just don't know if I'd end up in handcuffs if I tried.

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Yes, the ruins are national park. 17 acres. Most of the areas of the island still have private ownership and are off limits for browsing around, but the only access to the island is by ferry.  Then there is the beach access, which is probably two miles or more and is usable for tourists, but in the five times I've been out there I've seen more horses than people.  The horses are decendants of horses that swam to the island from a shipwreck by (I think) DeSoto in the 1700s.

The shore bank is not gradual like you see at Florida spaces like Panama City Beach where you walk out 20 feet into the water and aren't even up to your knees.  You step off the beach into this water and your three times over your head in about two steps.

It's still one of my favorite vacation destinations, even if I have to stay on Jekyll Island to have a hotel room and take the ferry for the day visit to Cumberland Island.  It's absoulutely beautiful and I'm chomping at the bit to detect out there

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Yeah, it's incredible there.  You hike the trail to the beach which takes about an hour from where the ferry lands, and you pass all of the ruins you pointed out on your map.  You can spend an entire day going through the ruins if you want to, but if you just glance at them it's an hour to the beach. The slave quarters, the old mansions that are in ruins, the old cemetary with graves dating back to the 1700s.  Then once you get to the beach, it's absolutely pristine.  You might see one or two other couples a quarter mile down, but for the most part it's desolate except for the occasional pack of horses that come dashing by.  

Then you walk down the beach to the authorized access to the live oak forest.  When you transfer from the beach to the forest you go instantly blind for about two minutes.  You go from bright sunshine to basically putting a blanket over your head.  You can't see anything until your eyes have time to adjust.  Hundreds of years old live oak trees all knarled up with limbs as thick as you as low as three feet off the ground.  Being a barrier island, the trees are not more than 20' tall, and the tops overlap each other so it creates perftect blackout canopy.  Not a single ray of sunlight gets through.  That's where the wild turkeys and armadillos and peacocks and peahens and untold other creatures other than humans hang out, and they have no fear of humans.  

I'll have 20 wild turkeys right here in my back yard up here in the Chatahooche National Forest at times, but if you crack the door to go get a closer look, they'll take off like you were shooting at them.  Out on Cumberland you can practically walk up to them and pet them.  In fact, once an ex-girlfriend and I were "doing it" on a picnic table in the middle of the forest and a turkey hopped up on the table and started inspecting our private parts to see what was going on.

I once carried my climbing shoes and chalk bag out there and spent a full day scaling the rock walls of the old Carnegie mansion.  No telling how much trouble I would have gotten into if I had been caught. I just wonder how much trouble I would get in if I was caught detecting there.

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