The notion of a British “beach” conjures up images of sugary sand between your toes, buckets and spades, deckchairs and jauntily painted beach huts. This, I’m afraid, is not the Chesil (in my experience of living in Dorset, fishermen, hikers and even local stick-throwing dog walkers never talk of “Chesil Beach” but simply “the Chesil”).

The setting for the film, out this week, of Ian McEwan’s 2007 novel On Chesil Beach is a geological war zone, where the angry, uppity Channel, backed by its mother lode of the wide, deep, lumpy Atlantic, and fuelled by the low pressure-driven predominantly south-westerly winds, throws its kicks and punches at Dorset’s genteel Jurassic coast. The snarling storms of winter hurl rocks at Dorset’s door, howling abuse and emptying their guts on the mat.

If you want to get technical, the Chesil is a tombolo, or a tied island. And a very famous tombolo it is too, listed among internationally renowned examples such as Fingal Bay in New South Wales, the Rock of Gibraltar and Shōdo Island, Japan.

To really understand the Chesil, you need to understand its relationship to the sea and the land. It is a barrier – made up of pebbles of rounded flint, chert and quartzite – separated from “mainland” Dorset by the Fleet lagoon. It is not a benign, softly spoken sandy place; it’s a rugged, scarred, changeling, born out of anger and violence.

That doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful. Quite the opposite. Stand and look west along the Chesil from the crown of Portland Bill at Tout Quarry sculpture park or – my favourite view of all – gaze from the top of the hill west of Abbotsbury Subtropical Gardens towards Portland. It will make your heart skip a beat.

And to be fair, walking any distance along the pebble and shingle bank of the Chesil will also make your heart thump like a kettle drum and your calves scream like herring gulls fighting over a dead mackerel.

Does that mean the Chesil is more fun to look at than it is to walk?

The way I like to enjoy the Chesil is in bite-size chunks. Otherwise it is too big (18 miles from the cliffs of Portland to the pier at West Bay), too calf-achingly crunchy, and there are too many zoned-off areas protecting the nesting sites of rare birds. It’s better to cherry-pick at the tastier, accessible parts than to try to swallow it whole. And for me, the best chunks normally involve eating or fishing, or both.

Bacon and egg pie at the Jailhouse Cafe beside HM Prison The Verne is a spectacular way to start any experience of the Chesil. The best views in Dorset are now supported by inmates from the young offenders’ institution on Portland, here on work placements. Even my three gut-bucket teenage sons struggle to polish off their generous portions.

Then it’s down to Billy Winters on the edge of Portland Harbour, a fist-size pebble throw from the start of the Chesil proper. This is a shack selling pulled pork in homemade ciabatta and a variety of vegetarian and seafood dishes, overlooking some of the best cockle and razor clam foraging beds in Dorset.

Across the Ferrybridge, at the mouth of the Fleet lagoon, sits the Crab House Café, looking across the lagoon at the Chesil, with the sea beyond. It serves locally caught fish: mackerel, pollack, plaice, crabs, lobster and oysters from its own oyster beds. Halfway along, on the landward side of the lagoon, is Moonfleet Manor hotel, the setting for J Meade Falkner’s 1898 adventure novel of shipwrecks and smuggling, Moonfleet.

The lagoon comes to an end at Abbotsbury, where the Swannery (from £10 adult, £7.50 child) offers up-close-and-personal contact with “baby swans” from mid-May to the end of June. Graffiti is not a big thing in west Dorset but recently someone spray-painted the word “cygnets” across a Swannery road sign that advertised “baby swans”.

See, that’s the way we roll in Dorset. True anarchy lies just beneath the surface.

From Abbotsbury to West Bexington, the Chesil is long and straight, a mound of sterile shingle blasted by the sea on one side and a haven for birds and sea plants on its land-hugging edge: plants with such gorgeous names as scarlet pimpernel, sea pea, common mouse ear and herb robert.

West Bexington is a mecca for sea anglers. Just offshore is a rare strip of unbroken sand that offers opportunities for catching plaice, sole, ray and migratory mackerel which, this year so far, seem as rare as hen’s teeth. But shoals of hungry mackerel should soon be cruising along the coast, chasing silver sprays of whitebait up on to the shingle.

Next stop is Cogden beach, with its convenient National Trust car park, a tasty one-mile walk west along the shingle to Hive Beach. The latter sits under the shadow of Billy Bragg’s house and the honeycomb-coloured cliffs that run all the way to West Bay, 2½ miles further west. The Hive Beach Café is crowded but deliciously dependable.

My favourite places to eat at West Bay are the Watch House Cafe – slightly scruffier but lovable sister to Hive Beach cafe – with wood-fired pizzas (from £10) and fish and chips (£15) that never disappoints, and Rachel’s, a kiosk on the harbour that serves fish from the local day boats and the sort of Dorset apple cake that your waistline wishes did not exist.

Serious walkers and visitors who need more than my greedy meanderings from fish plate to fish plate should call in at the Chesil Beach Visitors Centre at Ferrybridge, Portland, to experience the wisdom of the Dorset Wildlife Trust and to walk up on to the shingle where most of the shooting for the film took place.

For me though, my most joyful experiences of the Chesil are when I’m in my fishing boat, running alongside it from east to west a few hundred metres out to sea, as the sun is setting, on a calm summer’s evening. This is when its anger is calmed, the gurgling shingle is peppered with the fires and barbecues of anglers and their families, and the air is scented with tangy charcoal-cooked mackerel.

• The Vestry is part of a Victorian schoolhouse complex built into a hillside overlooking Chesil Beach. It sleeps four to eight, from £575 a week in low season