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Pristine solitude
The still-wild beaches of Botany Bay Plantation Wildlife Management Area are one of the site’s top attractions.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Setting the scene
Framed by moss-bearded live oaks, the entrance road to Botany Bay may be one of the most-photographed places in all of South Carolina.
Photo by Mic Smith
The dirt road leading into Botany Bay Plantation Wildlife Management Area has to be the most photographed road in all of South Carolina. It’s a tunnel of moss-bearded live oaks that, when the sun hits them, splotch eggshell patterns of shadow and light onto the ground. You can’t help but stop the car and snap the camera.
But if you turn around and venture no further, you’d be missing out on something equally as spectacular and beautiful—more than 4,000 acres of wildlife management area open to the public for free. You can enjoy the views whether you come for bicycling, horseback riding, birdwatching, beachcombing, car-touring, fishing or old-fashioned nature strolling.
All wildlife management areas are here to manage wildlife. The human aspect is something we incorporate secondary to the way we manage the property, says Daniel Barrineau, the S.C. Department of Natural Resources biologist in charge of managing Botany Bay. First and foremost, we have to keep it in the natural state and let the public come and enjoy it for what it is.”
Although all tours of Botany Bay are self-guided—a terrific socially distanced activity in which you sign in at the kiosk and drive around with a yellow parking pass—Barrineau and Bess Kellett, volunteer coordinator of the property, have agreed to meet me one morning to show me around. Our first stop is a building known as “the icehouse,” one of the only two surviving buildings from when the property was divided between two cotton plantations named Bleak Hall and Sea Cloud.
Like almost everything at Botany Bay, the icehouse serves as a kind of gateway into the property’s rich blend of history and ecology. The foundation is tabby—a mixture of limestone shells, water and sand (“the concrete of the day,” Kellett calls it)—and was designed to keep cool the giant chunks of ice that were brought down from New England.
“If you had ice back then,” Barrineau says, “you were somebody.”
And these somebodies, the Townsend family that owned the plantations, reputedly grew, using slave labor, the finest cotton fibers in the world—a premier long staple Sea Island cotton that was revered by inspectors.
However, it wasn’t until one Dr. James Greenway purchased the property in the 1930s that the name changed to what it is today. According to Kellett, Greenway had been to the famous Botany Bay near Sydney, Australia, and he decided that Bleak Hall as a name was, well, too bleak. The alliterative and pleasant-sounding Botany Bay is a much more suitable designation for a place with such a diverse mix of habitats: maritime forest, pine-oak forest, barrier islands, salt marsh and beach, and such a diverse mix of animal species: songbirds, shorebirds, raptors, doves, bobcats, deer, coyotes, quail, turkeys, rabbits and recently introduced fox squirrels.
After the icehouse, we drive to Jason’s Lake, stopping atop a human-made dam. In the 1960s, Dr. Greenway sold Botany Bay to hotel magnate John Meyer, a recreational sportsman who willed the property to the state upon his and his wife’s deaths.
“To think,” Kellett says, “this could have been Hilton Head or a golf course or something.”
“That’s the neat thing about the A.C.E. Basin,” Barrineau adds, referring to the 350,000 acres of estuary created from the Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto rivers, of which Botany Bay is a part. “The fact there is so much protected property, we have this here, instead of golf courses and hotels.”
These days, Jason’s Lake is open for adult-youth catch-and-release fishing on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. There’s plenty of fish to be caught—redfish, flounder, drum, trout and croakers—and you can launch a nonmotorized boat, like a canoe or kayak, as long as you don’t bring it on a trailer.
Our final stop of the day is the property’s most famous location, the major reason why over 70,000 visitors a year come to Botany Bay—the beach. To get there, you have to walk a half-mile along a boardwalk through the marsh and pass through two hummock islands, but then you arrive at what has been described as a “beachcomber’s paradise.”
Although you cannot collect shells or driftwood, this boneyard beach (called so because of wind- and tide-worn “bones” of fallen trees) is captivating.
“It’s beautiful,” says Denese Brunson, a Berkeley Electric Cooperative member from Goose Creek who is visiting Botany Bay for the first time with her husband, Stephen. They like to take daytrips to various South Carolina landmarks, and they both agree on one thing: “It’s one of the most exciting places in the state.”
Kellett and Barrineau love to hear such praise. Together with around 90 volunteers affectionately known as “grunts,” the Botany Bay staff spend every Tuesday (when Botany Bay is closed to the public) working on repairs and upkeep. They might repair bird boxes, clean up trash, fix roads, build new kiosks and tag butterflies.
“I’ve been volunteering out there since the day they opened it,” says Bud Skidmore, a longtime volunteer and native Edistonian. “It’s a very important part of this island, and it’s nice to know it’s being preserved—that no condos are going to be built on it, that the wildlife has a home, and that we can make a difference. Everybody that goes out there gets more out of it than they give.”
Finally, Kellett walks me out to something the untrained eye might miss. It’s a shell mound ring estimated to be 4,300 years old. Kellett tells me that an archaic people, here before even bows and arrows, had a true commerce area on this beach. They ate and drank here, and for reasons not fully known, they made precise ceremonial rings out of their oyster shells.
It is immensely profound to see something that has survived for more than four millennia, and you can’t help but think of all the time that has passed—the people, the animals, the weather that have shaped, and been shaped by, this landscape.
“You can get hung up on the word ‘preserve,’” Barrineau says. “But, obviously, we’re not trying to preserve exactly what’s here. It’s an ever-changing environment. Aesthetics are a big thing, but making sure the habitat is here is what’s critical.”
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Get There
Follow SC-174 to Botany Bay Road in Edisto Island.
Admission: Free. The area is open for general public visitation during daylight hours (a half-hour before sunrise to a half-hour after sunset). The area is closed on Tuesdays and for scheduled special hunts.
The rules: All visitors are required to obtain a day-use pass at the kiosk located at the main gate off of Botany Bay Road. Fig Island is closed to all public access. Jason’s Lake is open for adult-youth catch-and-release fishing Friday through Sunday.
To protect the natural integrity of Botany Bay:
- No horses or dogs are allowed on the beach.
- No alcohol is allowed inside the wildlife management area.
- No metal detectors are allowed.
- No drones are allowed.
- No shells, artifacts, driftwood or items can be removed from the property grounds, including the beach.
Details: For more information, contact (843) 869-2713.