Wild at heart The horses of Cumberland Island ISTOCK.COM / MICHAELWARRENPIX By Pamela A. Keene ISTOCK.COM / MICHAELWARRENPIX T Top: A mare and her foal graze in front of the ruins of Dungeness on Cumberland Island. Above: Cumberland has the only herd of feral horses on the Atlantic coast that is not managed by humans. 22 Georgia Magazine October 2020 he feral horses inhabiting Cumberland Island off Georgia's coast are cloaked in fact and fiction. The popular story is that these equines' ancestors arrived as shipwreck survivors during the early European exploration of the New World, after making their way across the Atlantic in Spanish galleons in the 1500s. "While it is true that horses were brought to the islands by the Spanish as livestock when they established missions in the late 1500s, the ancestors of the current herd were brought to the island much later," says Jill Hamilton-Anderson, interpretive ranger with the National Park Service at Cumberland Island National Seashore. Today the horses freely roam the 57-square-mile island, the largest and southernmost barrier island along Georgia's coast. Nearly 95 percent of the island is managed by the National Park Service, which operates campsites, a ranger station and several historic sites. Private landowners own the