Qualla: Once Brewed

Once Brewed: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Hanselmann, CC BY-SA 3.0. Drive into the village from the east and the sign reads Once Brewed. Drive in from the west and the sign reads Twice Brewed. There is only one place, only one cluster of buildings on the Military Road south of Hadrian's Wall, but it has insisted on two names for the better part of a century. The villagers shrug. The youth hostel, opened in the 1930s, declared that since the inn down the road was already called the Twice Brewed, the hostel would call itself Once Brewed. Both names stuck. Walkers stagger in off the Pennine Way looking for both, and find the same beer in the same glass either way.

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Image: Michael Hanselmann | CC BY-SA 3.0

Once Brewed: On the Military Road

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tine.wv, CC BY-SA 3.0. The village sits on the B6318, the road laid down in the years after the 1745 Jacobite rising — planned to move troops quickly between Newcastle and Carlisle after General Wade's forces were badly hampered by the lack of roads during the '45 campaign. Wade was building over older...

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Image: Tine.wv | CC BY-SA 3.0

Once Brewed: The Battle of the Brews

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rob Angus, CC BY-SA 3.0. Several stories explain the inn's name. The most romantic involves the night before the Battle of Hexham in 1464, during the Wars of the Roses. Yorkist foot soldiers stationed near the inn supposedly demanded their beer be brewed again because it lacked its usual fighting strengt...

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Image: Rob Angus | CC BY-SA 3.0

Once Brewed: The Sill Rises

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Keith Edkins at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0. For decades the YHA youth hostel at Once Brewed was a low, modest building that did its job and not much more. In 2015 it closed for demolition. In 2017 it reopened as The Sill, a striking modern building with a turf roof that slopes seamlessly into the surrounding moorland, desi...

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Image: The original uploader was Keith Edkins at English Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 3.0

Once Brewed: Vanished Villages

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Firth, CC BY-SA 2.0. Eighteenth-century maps of Northumberland show two other settlements that have since disappeared. Iverton appears in probate records as late as the 1830s and was probably either coextensive with Twice Brewed or right next to it. The historian R. G. Collingwood, writing in 1921, i...

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Image: John Firth | CC BY-SA 2.0