Botany Bay Plantation Heritage Preserve Guide

Botany Bay is the Lowcountry with the resorts stripped away: a 4,600-acre preserve on Edisto Island — two old sea-island cotton plantations gone back to nature — with almost three miles of undeveloped beachfront at the end of a moss-draped live-oak lane. The reason people make the drive is the boneyard beach, where the rising sea has drowned a maritime forest and left whole live oaks and palmettos standing and lying in the surf, bleached bone-white by salt and sun. Because shell collecting is banned, the sand is carpeted with whelks, sand dollars, and starfish nobody’s allowed to pocket — so it stays impossibly full. It’s free, it’s wild, and it’s one of the strangest, most photographed shorelines in the state.