Bean Burn is another of those names that sounds as if it belongs in a children's book, and the Roman camp here is one of the less visible members of the frontier zone along Hadrian's Wall. A temporary camp was a rough overnight enclosure for a column of soldiers, thrown up with a ditch and a bank and abandoned the next morning, and Bean Burn 2 is one of a family of such camps scattered across the moors south of the wall. If you go looking for stone, you will be disappointed. What you will find is open moorland, with a wide sky and the quiet that belongs to a place where the nearest road is a single-track lane.
Haltwhistle is about five kilometres away and Haydon Bridge about nine, so help is close, but the large fuel and supermarket stop is Hexham, roughly eighteen kilometres away. It is worth filling up there before heading into the uplands, because the road network is thin and the villages small.
The roads here form part of one of England's best-kept secrets for motorcyclists. South of the wall, between the South Tyne and the Allen valleys, minor roads climb onto heather moor with long open views, dropping into hidden valleys with a farmhouse and a cluster of sycamores. The gradients are fair, the bends are broad and the surface is mostly decent, though cattle grids, sheep and sudden dips filled with water are part of the game. Cyclists and walkers on the Pennine Way and the Hadrian's Wall Path share the area, so keep your speed sensible near the junctions.
The landscape belongs to the Northumberland National Park's southern fringe, a country of curlews, lapwings and red grouse, with skylarks overhead in spring and wheatears on the walls. In late summer the heather turns purple and the moors smell of honey. In winter the same roads can be bleak, icy and closed by snow, so check conditions before setting out.
Understanding the camps is a small pleasure: they remind you that the army was a moving thing, and that the famous wall was only one part of a system of roads, forts and camps that held the northern frontier in place for centuries.