Hire A Minibus To Visit Dorset’s Wonderful Coastline

For people who live in the M4 corridor, great days out are never far away. After all, the Cotswolds are on the doorstep, while attractions ranging from London’s bright lights to the history of Bath’s Roman remains and Wiltshire’s stone circles are close by.

However, while the south of England has loads of wonderful inland attractions, sometimes you can’t beat a trip to the beach and with the recent weather being some of the hottest of the year and the school holidays having weeks to run, now could be a great time to hire a minibus and take a party to the beach.

There are lots of places you can go and some of these are very popular tourist honeypots like Brighton and Margate, but there are many alternatives, not least in Dorset.

Why Visit Dorset’s Beaches?

Dorset has some popular beaches of its own, of course, and if you were to make your way to Bournemouth you would be enjoying a fine beach with great seafront facilities, including beach huts and a pier. Although you will be among crowds, this is for a good reason, as it has been listed as Britain’s favourite beach in 2024 by Tripadvisor contributors.

If that is what you want then all is well, but there are many other options to choose from, with not just beaches to enjoy, but rugged scenery, rock formations, one of Britain’s biggest lagoons and the chance to find a prehistoric fossil on the aptly-named Jurassic Coast.

Chesil Beach and the Isle of Portland, located near Weymouth, is a great place to start. The wild shingle beach is 18 miles long and separates the sea from The Fleet, one of the world’s biggest brackish lagoons. The Fleet is a great space for bird spotting and boat trips are also available.  

You can even spot fascinating WW2 relics such as pill boxes and anti-tank blocks, while the Fleet was used to test the ‘bouncing bomb’ used by the Dambusters.

At the eastern end of Chesil Beach is the Isle of Portland, connected to Weymouth on the mainland via a bridge. This rocky outcrop won’t offer a beach, but it has rugged scenery, a castle and several museums. Indeed, if the WW2 features at Chesil Beach have got you interested, Portland has a museum dedicated to the D-Day landings.

Great Scenery On The English Coastal Path

If Bournemouth and the Weymouth-Portland area are popular resorts, there are also more rural stretches along the Dorset coast, which you can walk on as part of the England Coastal Path and, where there is a safe descent, use to access some rather less crowded beaches.

It is along this route that you can also enjoy some of the most spectacular scenery, such as the natural arch of Durdle Door near Lulworth Cove, or the cliffs at St Oswald’s Bay.

You should heed safety advice around the cliffs as they are high, steep and prone to erosion. However, this fact also means that new rock faces are regularly uncovered, which is great news for fossil hunters as this is an area rich in preserved specimens. The Jurassic Coast is a UNESCO World Heritage site for this very reason.

Park Up For Jurassic Exploration

Although the best time to hunt for fossils is after the winter storms because they will have exposed new rocks, you can look around at any time for anything ranging from small prehistoric sea creatures like ammonites with their distinctive curly stones to something belonging to a huge marine reptile.

Famous finds have included complete plesiosaur and Ichthyosaur skeletons, while the Weymouth Bay Pliosaur is on display at the Dorset Museum in Dorchester.

To discover more, you can get guided fossil hunter tours such as the one run by Lyme Regis Museum along the town’s beach, or see the Spyway dinosaur footprints imprinted in the rock at Swanage.

You won’t be able to do all these things in one day, of course; it may be you will hire the minibus for a long weekend or even a week. Alternatively, with so many different options from busy sandy beaches to coastal walks, fossil hunting to wartime history, you can find the activities that interest you the most and enjoy them after travelling down in comfort.

With the convenient and efficient transport afforded by a minibus, you can enjoy a fantastic trip down to the coach and enjoy something a little different from the norm, hopefully blessed with some fine summer weather. And if it turns out to be as great a day as you hoped, you can always come back to us to hire a minibus again for a repeat trip soon.