We arrived late on Friday, just in time for a short blustery walk along Chesil Beach to watch the fishermen setting up their rods for the night - this is prime mackerel fishing territory. Back at the Manor Hotel restaurant that night, there was no mackerel on the menu; instead I had plaice with samphire, both locally sourced. The bill for two starters, two mains, a bottle of Brown Brothers reserve chardonnay and a half bottle of Argentinian red came to £83 but we could have eaten for less in the cosy cellar bar.

A few miles along the coast from West Bexington is West Bay, at first glance a typical seaside town with fish and chip and ice cream kiosks dotted round the harbour, bingo and an amusement arcade and, on a rainy day last weekend, families huddled together waiting for a break in the rain. On closer inspection West Bay turned out to be rather more upmarket than bingo suggests - a penthouse apartment overlooking the brand new multi-million pound pier is on the market for £500,000 and a posh restaurant, the Riverside, serves up £22.50 bass fillets to a cosmopolitan crowd. The wet weather provided an excellent excuse for a long lunch there - it does a more affordable three-course set menu of grilled scallops with herb butter, roasted salmon with hollandaise sauce and warm treacle tart with ice cream for £16. Chef Neil Chillcot popped out to talk fishing and rugby and give us directions to Wisteria Cottage, a nearby B&B and our next port of call.

Sitting on a hill above the village of Whitchurch Canonicorum - so called because St Candida is the only parish church that still retains the bones of its saint - the cottage is as idyllic as it sounds, but like all good B&Bs, it's the owner who really makes the stay. Dave Green is passionate about the area and plied us first with tea, then wine, as he waxed lyrical about big skies, swimming in the sea and "the many little surprises" he'd discovered since moving down from London three years ago. Surprises like Mr Shigeaki Takezoe who runs Hell Barn Cottages near Bridport and offers self-catering guests home-cooked Japanese meals, or the fact that Georgi Markov [the murdered Bulgarian dissident] is buried in the churchyard at Whitchurch Canonicorum. We spent the evening with Dave, moving from his terrace when it got too cold, to his local, the Five Bells, a no-frills, one-room pub with a suitably eccentric cast of regulars.

By Sunday morning the storms had blown the clouds away to reveal a perfect summer's day. We climbed up the heather-covered hill behind the cottage to take in the view - West Bay and Lyme Regis to the west, an undulating patchwork of gold and green fields to the east. Later at Charmouth, the beach was full of stripy windbreaks, kids with ice-cream covered faces and yappy dogs. Alongside the buckets and spades, there are hammers for hire, for this is the best place in the area to hunt for fossils. Charmouth's smart heritage centre, newly kitted out with lottery funding, shows off some of the local finds. It's a treasure trove for amateur paleontologists but we were more interested in the beach. The Jurassic Coast stretches 95km from Exmouth to Studland Bay near Bournemouth, but the west Dorset section with its dramatic honeycomb-coloured cliffs, empty stretches of sand and pebbly banks rising up to meet fields of wildflowers is surely the most spectacular.