The Jurassic Coast runs for 95 miles between Orcombe Point in East Devon and Old Harry Rocks in Dorset, and most visitors never get past the headline acts. That is a shame, because tucked between the busy honey pots are small shingle bays that only reveal themselves at the end of a footpath — which is precisely why they stay quiet. The five below all ask for a walk, a little planning and a healthy respect for tides and access rules. None has a café, a bin or a lifeguard.

Read This Before You Plan a Visit

Access along this coast is not uniform. Some of these coves sit on open access land, others on permissive paths, and two lie inside a live military range. Check the rules for your chosen bay before you leave the house, and never assume a path shown on an older map is still open — landslips and cliff falls cause regular diversions.

• Tides: every cove here shrinks fast at high water. Check a local tide table and arrive on a falling tide, giving yourself a couple of hours either side of low water.
• Ranges: the military ranges between Lulworth and Kimmeridge are usually open at weekends and during school holidays, but not when red flags are flying or firing is scheduled. Confirm the position on the day.
• Cliffs: keep clear of the base of cliffs, particularly after rain. Weathered Jurassic rock is soft, crumbly and falls without warning.
• Safety: no lifeguards, patchy mobile signal, steep and loose paths. Tell someone your route and roughly when you expect to be back.

Mupe Bay and Worbarrow Bay

These two are neighbours, separated by a ridge of chalk, and both sit inside the ranges between Lulworth Cove and Kimmeridge. Mupe Bay is the smaller and prettier of the pair: a crescent of shingle and pale sand with the Mupe Rocks standing offshore and Bindon Hill rising steeply behind. Worbarrow is broader and emptier, closed at its eastern end by Worbarrow Tout and backed by the ramparts of Flower's Barrow hillfort.

Reach them on foot from Lulworth Cove along the ridge path — around a mile and a half of steady climbing before the descent — or, when the ranges are open, from the car park at Tyneham. Doing both in one walk is the obvious move, dropping into Mupe first and then following the path east over the ridge. Allow three to four hours for the round trip, and expect the final descent into Worbarrow to be steep and greasy after wet weather. There is no shelter at either bay if the weather turns.

St Gabriel's Mouth

West of Seatown and just beneath Golden Cap, this is the quietest cove on the West Dorset stretch. A steep path drops down from the coast path through woodland and scrub, with steps and tree roots underfoot, opening onto a shingle and rough-sand beach hemmed in by low crumbling cliffs. Above it, halfway up the hillside, sit the remains of a small medieval chapel — a good excuse to pause on the climb back out.

The beach narrows sharply at high tide, so time your visit for low to mid water if you want to explore the ledges at either end. Ammonites and belemnites turn up in the shingle here, and it is a fine spot for a flask and a sandwich when the wind is from the north. The path down is genuinely slippery in the wet, and the return climb is steeper than it looks.

Chapman's Pool

A collapsed quarry bowl on the Purbeck coast, Chapman's Pool is reached from Worth Matravers along the coast path, roughly a mile and a half of easy walking, or by the track down from the Renscombe area. The bay itself is shingle and boulders with ruined quarry buildings at its head and a steep slipway into the water. The seabed shelves quickly and currents can be strong, so treat swimming as a serious decision rather than a spur-of-the-moment one.

The surrounding cliffs are rich in fossils and the geology is dramatic, but the slopes above the beach are loose. Stay off them, and stick to the marked path when you leave.

Church Ope Cove

On the east side of Portland, this small sheltered bay is reached by a long flight of uneven stone steps from the churchyard and the ruins above. It is a suntrap on a still day and the most sheltered of the five, with shingle, a few rock pools and fossilised tree stumps in the limestone. The steps are steep, occasionally closed after rock movement, and not suitable for anyone unsteady on their feet. Take your time, and carry everything back up with you.

What to Carry and What to Leave Behind

Treat each of these coves as a place with no services at all, because that is exactly what they are.

• Carry out all litter. Fruit peel, apple cores, wet wipes and dog bags are litter too. There are no bins anywhere near these beaches, and anything left behind ends up in the sea.
• Leave no trace of a fire. Do not light fires or use disposable barbecues — the gorse and undercliff above these bays burn readily.
• Be careful with fossils. Loose material on the shingle is fair game, but hammering into cliffs or bedrock is not acceptable on a World Heritage coastline. Photograph and leave the big pieces.
• Dogs on leads near livestock and along the cliff tops during the nesting season.
• Take a paper map, water and a charged phone. Signal fades in the undercliff, and the path back always feels longer than the path down.

Go early, go slowly, and take everything home with you. These bays stay special precisely because they take a bit of effort — and because the people who make that effort know how to look after them.