It is perhaps the most English of English monuments.

But a new study by Oxford University and University College London suggests that Stonehenge was actually built by the Welsh.

Although it was known that that the bluestones of the megalithic monument had been sourced from the Preseli Mountains in Wales, it was generally thought the builders travelled there from modern-day Wiltshire to get them.

However isotope analysis of the skulls of people buried at the 5000-year-old Neolithic monument show unmistakable Welsh origins.

Isotopes of elements occur everywhere in the environment, and those that are in the food we eat or the water we drink become incorporated into our tissue and bone.

By looking at the different ratios it is possible to work out where and when a person lived based on their isotope make up.

Professor Mike Parker Pearson, of UCL, who believes that the whole monument may have once stood in Wales, said: “This is a really exciting discovery because it shows how far some of the Stonehenge people travelled.

“But what’s really fascinating is that this date of around 3000 BC coincides with our radiocarbon dates for quarrying at the bluestone outcrops in the Preseli hills of Pembrokeshire.