The secret history of Rude Britain has been uncovered by a North-East archaeologist.

Cathy Tuck, from Wylam in Northumberland, spent two years on a 30,000-mile trek around Britain finding hundreds of sexually symbolic landmarks, buildings and gardens for her book Landscapes and Desire.

From phallic ancient standing stones to womb-like burial chambers, her odyssey of the sexual takes in sites dating back more than 5,000 years and explodes the myth that Britain is a sexually repressed nation.

Instead, she says, Britain should be regarded as "wonderfully rude" - with the North-East among the country's hot-spots for bawdy buildings and licentious landscapes.

She said: "We've got a reputation for being prudish and repressed and I think that is really quite unjust.

"Britain is just packed with these sexually inspired sites - everywhere you go there is an undercurrent of sexuality.

"It's not something to frown upon or even to giggle at: it's a wonderful acknowledgement of human sexuality. Britain is a wonderfully rude place.

"I wrote the book in two years, which is fairly quick, because I couldn't believe no-one had done it before and I was racing against the clock to get it out.

"I did lots of research, then went to visit the sites and experience what their sexual symbolism would have meant."

Cathy, 33, a former pupil of Prudhoe High School who has worked on Channel Four's Time Team, began work on the book when she was asked to survey a park in Buckinghamshire for her job as a landscape archaeologist with English Heritage.

She stumbled on to a sexually explicit grotto, and began looking into how many similar sites there were around the country.

In the North-East, she found phalluses carved on to the foundation stones of the Roman bridge at Chollerford, Northumberland, and the fort at nearby Chesters which would have been a good luck charm to people of the time.

She also became interested in the 18th Century Seaton Delaval Hall where the notorious lothario Sir Francis Blake Delaval had the walls of the upper hall rigged with pulleys and ropes so he could pull them up and expose his guests in compromising positions.

She said: "When I was doing the book I plotted every single site that we found that had some sexual significance. There were certainly a few hotspots, and Northumberland is definitely quite a feisty place.

"All around Newcastle there are some wonderful surviving Roman sites and many of them have phalluses carved on them because they were good luck totems. If you go to the foundations of the Roman bridge at Chollerford, hidden amongst the leaf mould and grass is a wonderfully phallic carving.

"There's one at Chesters as well and at Vindolanda and Birdoswald. The Romans were just obsessed with phalluses."

Cathy's history of sexually symbolic sites comes full circle in the book's final chapter, which takes in modern-day landmarks such as the Julian Opie outlines of naked male and female figures on either side of the Gateshead Millennium Bridge.

The book also has a gazetteer of sexually symbolic sites, with Cathy encouraging readers to explore the lusty locations for themselves.

"If people open their eyes and take a look around them," she said, "it's amazing what they will see."