Explore 4 of the Ocean State’s Hidden Beaches

Stroll along West Beach in the Charlestown village of Quonochontaug, or as it is lovingly called, Quonnie. Photography by Wolf Matthewson

Rhode island is home to more than 400 miles of coastline, but believe it or not, not every mile comes with a cost. Luckily, many Ocean Staters have a favorite freebie secret beach, though not everyone wants to share the deets. Finding these idyllic spots might mean sneaking down a coastal right of way or abandoning your car in a random parking lot and hoofing or biking it (or maybe even boating to it). Others might have to rent a beach house to access it or visit during offbeat hours to avoid fees. Either way, if you’re a true Rhode Islander, odds are you know your way around without forking over your cold, hard-earned cash. While parking fees continue to climb at public spots, there are still some off-the-beaten path stretches where you can soak up the sun gratis. We can’t tell you exactly where to find them all, but we can motivate you to find your own. Some of our favorite writers and staff members spilled the salt-tea on where they frolic in the sand for free.

Edited by Jamie Coelho with contributions by Lauren Clem, Ann Hood, Paul Kandarian and Casey Nilsson

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Blue Beach, Quonset

by Casey Nilsson

Photography by Wolf Matthewson

Guard station (think: flight practice over your beach blanket) and, because it’s free, scant public amenities besides a parking lot port-a-potty.

You might prefer snack shacks and shower stations. You might, even, be able to look beyond the beach fees — parking AND admittance! — and packed shoreline to the glory of the deep, rolling sea. You take all the beaches south and east of Quonset; we’ll keep Blue Beach.

“We” includes my mom, my dad, myself and my kids. My parents will be arm-wrestling a temperamental beach wagon stocked with chicken salad sandwiches, beverages of all sorts, sunscreen, beach toys, a pop-up tent, a microfiber blanket, several striped towels, two Tommy Bahama beach chairs, a portable speaker with Dave Matthews cued up — hey, mom: what am I forgetting?

Her response, I suspect, would be “Lots of things, Casey.” I’ll be the one donning a small rucksack of non-negotiables with cute kids in tow, both handling their own nets and buckets and shovels. My parents tolerate my mooching with grace.

Blue Beach is undeniably magical: You wind your car through Quonset Business Park, and the light begins to diffuse. Eventually, you come to a small dirt parking lot with split-rail fences that help newcomers wayfind to a footpath toward the beach.

It’s not a short path — about a half-mile long — but it’s bound to the Blue Beach experience. Lined with honeysuckle and wildflowers, the path weaves beneath a canopy of trees, dapples of sunlight punctuating long stretches of shade. Here, I find myself losing all sense of purpose and just strolling amid the birdsong, dismantled when Narragansett Bay appears, fittingly, out of the blue. 

Go left for the best view of flight practice; kids love to climb the jetty rocks and search for marine treasures. Go right and you’ll find our basecamp: a strip of sand next to a small river that runs from the bay through breezy seagrass. Here, kids splash in knee-deep waters and hunt for minnows with candy-colored nets. My daughter, the perennial inventor, and my son, her dedicated engineer, build sandy levies to stop the stream.

The swimming experience is similarly gentle. Swimmers might not like the never-ending shallow, but parents sure do. One of my favorite beach memories involves my mother, my father and I teaching my daughter how to float, the Jamestown Bridge framing the generational lesson.

We love this place. Sure, you might not — but I think you will. Your whole family, too. And, if you do join, bring extra snacks; we can consider it an admittance fee.

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Quonnie Beach

by Paul Kandarian

Photography by Wolf Matthewson

The sun is 4.5 billion years old and has kissed the Earth every morning roughly 1.65 trillion times. I’ve been around for the tiniest fraction of them, but to me, nowhere is sunrise more beautiful than on West Beach in the Charlestown village of Quonochontaug, or as it is lovingly known to many of us, Quonnie.

My girlfriend’s family has summered at Quonnie for almost eighty years on this short but gorgeous stretch of sand that runs from the cluster of McMansions on Central Beach on one side to the Quonnie Breachway on the other, connecting the roaring Atlantic to serene Quonochontaug Pond. West Beach is an eclectic mix of old-fashioned cottages and multi million-dollar homes and seems to be the least populated of the three sandy enclaves — West, Central and East beaches — and we like it like that. You can’t access the beach in season unless you own a house or rent one. The dead of winter is a lovely time to visit, with only squalling gulls to bother you.

The cottage we rent is old-school, with its tiny, hard-to-navigate kitchen and paper-thin walls that make public even the most hushed conversations in adjoining rooms. Other basic amenities include the cottage’s water supply contained in a giant plastic cistern in the basement and a one-minute walk to the beach along a windy path through thick-and-thorny rugosa rose overgrowth. There is no air conditioning: Window fans augment the ever-present cooling ocean breezes.

It is hard-core, nothing-fancy Quonnie. And we love every blessedly inconvenient lack of frills.

Here the ceaseless tide reconfigures the beach season to season, and even day to day, depending on the severity of storms. Giant rocks disappear under a blanket of tide-strewn sand until the next storm clears the way to make them accessible. I love to gaze at the ocean and the distant horizon hump of Block Island or just watch the pounding surf explode in thin, lacy fans of seawater against the wave-destroying boulders at water’s edge.

It is a place of temporary friendships; people who summer here know each other only here. But they have known each other for decades and formed friendships seasonal but lasting, conversations renewed easily on the beach as the cadence of the waves keeps pace.

Generational passage is as endless at Quonnie as the waves; children who scrambled over rocks here three-quarters of a century ago now scramble to keep up with their grandchildren. Parents cherish exposing their little ones to the wonders of nature, trolling for crabs and tiny fish in vernal pools at low tide, mining for smooth sea glass, plucking mussels off rocks, filling a bucket with snails, tossing tiny handfuls of slipper shells into the air to hear them tinkle back to the sand in a chime of cascading calcium carbonate — and just making countless memories.

I’m not usually a predawn riser except at Quonnie, lightly descending creaky cottage stairs without waking others to walk in the cold sand and perch on a rock, watching the sun seep up from the horizon and bathe the beach in a brilliant glow of varying colors, blood red some days, sweet deep orange on others, depending how the sun’s rays dance to Earth through the prism of wispy high clouds.

The sun has kissed the Earth more than a trillion and a half times over its lifespan. Over mine, I’ve been around for about 26,000 of them. And none are more special than the precious seasonal few I cherish at Quonnie.

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Little Compton

by Ann Hood

Photography by Wolf Matthewson

I grew up Coppertoned, blanket-to-blanket, with WPRO telling me to “turn so you don’t burn” on Scarborough Beach. But in adulthood, I found my beach happiness in Little Compton, Tiverton and Westport, Massachusetts. Long empty stretches of sand. No music blaring. The sound of the waves and sometimes even a seal or two popping up to
say hello. 

For many summers, I packed my car with beach blankets and folding chairs, goggles and fins and bocce balls, wine and food and snacks and games, my kids and their friends, and headed to a house just off Elephant Rock Beach in Westport for a week or two or three, whatever I could afford that year.

I filled that house with friends and family, walking through a small path, over some rocks, right to the beach. A fine beach, where we could sit and watch the sky turn trippy colors and sip wine and feel the cool evening summer air. However, this is not my secret beach. It is how I found my secret beach. Because after that house was no longer for rent, I scoured real estate ads and asked anyone I saw at Lees Market or the yarn store or anywhere at all if they knew of a house for rent.

That is how my husband and I found a house one summer, and filled it with family and friends, and how I came to say to someone who lived near those magical beaches that we would love to buy a house there. Like good friends do, within days she called to tell us she had found our dream house. And it was. It was! A perfect tiny house near the beginning of a sandy path that wended past beach roses, over a small wooden bridge, over a small knoll, to the most perfect beach in the world.

“Our beach!” we both said, and we imagined the days spent there, books in our laps, sun on our faces, salt in the air. We imagined picnics and sunsets as our life unfolded on that beach. But all of that depended on us buying our dream house. And dreams are pricey sometimes. We scrambled. We rearranged funds. We noted how very tiny the house actually was. Could we add on to it? Could we even afford it? Before we answered those questions, our dream house sold. Our hearts broke. But as C.S. Lewis pointed out, after a broken dream, “dream again.”

We couldn’t have the house, but we could still have the beach, we thought. Even though there was no place to park. It is technically a public beach, but the lack of parking does make it difficult to access, and therefore secret. To do so, you need a husband like mine, who will load the car with the beach stuff and the beach goers, drop you off to walk that sandy path, then park the car somewhere far, far away, and ride his bike back to the beach. Shhhh.

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Fogland Beach

by Lauren Clem

Photography by Wolf Matthewson

In the months and years since the start of the pandemic, I’ve often heard friends and family lamenting those early days. Not the fear, the isolated uncertainty of grappling with an unseen enemy, nor the division that came later when the initial shock wore off. But in between, there was a certain stillness — a slowing down of life, a desire to kiss your children and hold your loved ones close, to spend long evenings in backyards and around kitchen tables that hasn’t been felt by most of us before or since.

It was during these days that my boyfriend mentioned Tiverton’s Fogland Beach. He’d gone many years before with friends, but in four years of dating we’d had no reason to make the long drive from northern Rhode Island to the strip of land that juts into the Sakonnet River from the East Bay. The route takes us past cities and over countless bridges, the steepled streets of Fall River, Massachusetts, giving way to farm country before we reach the turn. On our first visit, a police car sits at the entrance to Three Rod Way — there’d been some discussion of restricting travel between the states — but we slip through unnoticed, our license plates the only password to a secret escape.

In the evenings, the rocky beach is quiet, with only picnic tables and closed-up restrooms to indicate a different mood during the day. We wander hand-in-hand along the surf, inspecting the pebbles for interesting bits among the shells. Other couples and small families keep their distance. The adults smile quietly at each other, all of us grateful to live here — near green fields and pounding waves — and not in a high-rise somewhere, confined to our homes by crowded sidewalks. Across the river, the sun sets over the sloping lawns of Portsmouth, a world away from our quiet retreat.

After exhausting the beach, we pick our way along the road to the salt marsh on the other side of the peninsula. In season, fishermen line the seaweed-covered rocks and cast their lines into the bay. Egrets stalk noiselessly among the reeds. On one visit, the water ripples with the movements of a thousand baitfish congregating in the shallows. At the far end of the marsh, teenagers huddle around a bonfire, desperate to reclaim some of the normalcy taken from them this graduation season. We allow them their celebration and return by the other side.

The tidepools here constantly shift and change, and I’m startled on another visit to find the landscape rewritten. A shortcut through beach roses is now a stream we must ford or leap across. 

Long after masks and social distancing have faded away, we continue our summer visits. Sometimes we grab lobster rolls and chowder from Evelyn’s Drive-In and set up on the beach, racing to eat before the sea gulls swoop in. Those quiet evenings are long gone, replaced by a flood of pent-up gatherings that seem to multiply as if to make up for lost time. But for a few evenings each summer, we make the drive, and the world falls away to the movement of tidepools and the gentle, unending waves.