The Twice Brewed inn gives its name to a stretch of Northumberland where the Roman frontier is at its most dramatic. Here the Great Whin Sill, a hard sheet of dark volcanic rock, breaks in a long line of cliffs facing north, and the Wall runs along the very edge of it, rising and falling like a stone roller-coaster. Haltwhistle, five kilometres off, is the nearest town, and Hexham lies a good deal further east.
The Romans liked to build on a crag. A soldier on the Wall here had the whole of the empire's northern edge in front of him, wet moorland and empty hills, and the plain to the south behind. Temporary camps like the one on your map were the overnight bases of marching armies. They are only earth banks and ditches, thrown up in an afternoon, laid out in neat rectangles, and left behind, and many survive as faint outlines in grass, best seen in low evening light or after a dusting of snow. Vindolanda, the great fort and settlement a short distance away, is where the famous wooden writing tablets were found, letters and lists in ink, among them an invitation to a birthday party. Sycamore Gap, a dip in the crags with a single tree, became famous after it appeared in a Hollywood film, and the tree was felled in the autumn of 2023, a sad loss to local people.
The road, the B6318, is the Military Road, built in the 1750s after the Jacobite rising of 1745 to move troops across the country, and it uses much of the Wall's stone as its foundation. It is straight where the Romans were straight, and then it rolls over sharp rises and dips where it follows the crags, with blind summits and sudden dips. Sheep and cyclists share it, and the surface is patched. In the summer the car parks fill by ten, and in winter ice and snow can close it, so go early on a weekday.
The area is the heart of a dark sky park, one of the best places in England to see the stars, and the visitor centre at Once Brewed explains it. The inn serves hearty food and local ale, and the car park is a good base for walking. Fuel is at Haltwhistle, with nearly four thousand people, or at Hexham, a larger town of eleven thousand, so fill the tank beforehand.