I know some people who own a house on the Potomac River in rural Virginia, and I have a shitty boat stored down there that I use to fish when I have a free weekend. They live on a pretty isolated dead end road that follows a little finger of land between the tidal Potomac and a small bay. The road dead ends about 500 yards before the peninsula ends, and the remaining area on the little finger of land is heavily wooded with cedar trees and some marshy areas. There are only four or five houses on the peninsula, and the rest of the peninsula is owned by a 90 year old guy who owns the house closest to it.

If you drive to where the road dead ends, and start to walk out toward the end of the peninsula, you'll turn back before you get 50 yards. It's a wooded area near water (read: bugs), and there's a lot of mud with patchy areas of knee-deep brackish water, snakes, tall reeds that block your vision, angry osprey parents circling over your head, etc. I take my boat out to the other side of the peninsula, which sits further out of the water, and is more woods than marsh. There are probably about 20 acres of woods there, not including the impassable marshy parts, and the first few times I landed there I explored a little bit. The third or fourth time I landed there, I noticed what looked like a little cove. When I got closer in my boat, I knew I was looking at a man made deep water cove. I pulled in and tied up, and found a steep set of stairs ahead of me. After climbing up the switchbacks, I found an old home site. There is a mound with the remnants of a large rectangular foundation and the stump of a chimney.

The most intriguing part of the entire site is the cellar. People don't usually build cellars so close to the water, but its contents were relatively intact, indicating it never floods and isn't occupied by homeless people. The area around the site and the foundation is an unusual type of rock for the area, and the site is slightly elevated. I don't think anyone else knows the place exists, even the old man who owns the property. I go there once in a while and hang out in what would have been the house's back yard, which has a great view of the river.