TV presenter and archaeology writer May-Ann Ochota is on her way to the North-East to point out some of the fascinating facts that are right under our noses... drawn from her new book Hidden Histories.

"It's exactly what motivated me to write the book in the first place. I studied archaeology and anthropology at university and I remember clearly on my first field trip standing with a prehistoric chamber team in Wiltshire and the tutor starting pointing out features in the tomb and wider landscape that put all the pieces together telling this huge, incredible story. It was laid out in front of me, but I just needed someone to point these things out. Otherwise, you don't know what you're looking at," she says as she prepares for a Royal Geographical Society visit to Central Hall, Dolphin Centre, Darlington, on February 11.

Ochota had now joined the ranks of the landscape detectives and feels that this is all down to the United Kingdom being choc-a-bloc with history that people can trip over in their gardens.

"So many people are interested in understanding what it all means that I wrote the book to give them a few pointers that they can use to pad out the stories that are told in the area around them. There are loads of stuff in the North-East. There is fantastic prehistoric rock art in Northumberland, which involves patterns that have been engraved in outcrops of rock or boulders. It's not like the cave paintings found in France with animals galloping across the fields.

"British rock art is a bit more subtle shall we say. Most of the motifs are centred around cups and rings. Cups are a little divot or depression in the stone and the ring is a concentric circle that goes around the cup mark. Sometimes you get concentric circles and other times there are grooves that come out or join sections together. Sometimes the creators ignore the natural features and do their own thing over the top. We don't really know what they were for and you can't date the rock, but most seem to have been created between 2,400 BC and 1,200 BC. So that's from the end of the Stone Age to the middle of the Bronze Age," says Ochota.

Some experts think its a symbolic map, but Ochota feels that this doesn't line up with the stars or land features.

"Some people think if you poured something onto the stone like oil, dye, blood or milk and how the liquid falling meant something in a ritual kind of way. I like the idea of blood splashing because I like the gruesome things. Others say that maybe it was just the process of making marks, like the initiation of warriors, when you scratched a symbol – or made a mark after the birth of a child – which only gives us the side effects of these ancient people doing this. They are brilliant because you have to tramp about to find them, although the internet is a wonderful thing, and so is the smartphone, because you can GPS position yourself quite accurately when you're trundling yourself across the moors looking for one single stone against many."

She laughs when I suggest these marks could even be by the graffiti artists of their time... "After 5,000 years, anyone's guess is as good as another's... part of the adventure is the wandering and wondering about what our ancestors were getting up to."

Ochota is looking forward to her first visit to Darlington having made her reputation travelling the world, including the Chernobyl exclusion zone, the Algerian Sahara, Australia's Simpson Desert and the slums of Dhaka and Delhi.

For Darlingtonians, she points out Piercebridge's Roman bridge being "pretty much" the best in Britain. "It's about 90metres from the modern course of the River Tees, and the quality of the stonework is astonishing. It might once have had a wooden section in the middle, but we're not really sure. But it was important to the Romans to show that they had conquered the Britons and pushed any opposition to the Northern frontier," she says.

While Dere Street was the main North-South road, and the heritage trail starts near Binchester Fort, Ochota explains that although it was as straight as possible, this still involved being pragmatic about the best route regarding high points and fords.

"Dere Street continued being the most important route throughout the Medieval period and although the A1(M) has come along since then, we haven't changed the Roman idea that the straightest road is the best," she adds.

Ochota's TV presenting has included Time Team and Unreported World. Are the rock formations right for another history-hunting series like Time Team?

"It is a cult programme and part of my childhood growing up and the sort of things that gets you into archaeology in the first place. I think a lot of people my age would say the same. The exciting way that the stories unfolded in front of you on TV, thanks to an artifact or some aspect of a building, is down to the fact that you're the first person to have seen this since the last person who held that artifact, dropped it from their pocket or built it. It's really exciting to hold a piece of the past in your hand and I think that's a credit to Time Team that the British public are so interested in archaeology and understand it. You can go down the pub and have a conversation about geophysics. People know what you're talking about and that's down to Time Team.

"People are scratching their heads about what the next series like this should be like. How to present archaeology on TV is always down to the challenge that you can't promise that anything will happen. You might be lucky and find the king in the car park, but most of the time it's quit subtle and just present things that require research and tell a fact-based story, rather than someone shouting, 'Oh look, we've found this amazing thing'."

n Mary-Ann Ochota, Dolphin Centre: Saturday, February 11, 7.30pm. Tickets: £12, concessions £11, RGS-IBG members and one guest £10 each. Box Office: 01325-486555 or Cornmill Shopping Centre