For years http://www.amberstall.com has used the same robots.txt
without any issues. It has not changed since Nixon was president yet
for some reason webmaster tools is declaring it as unreachable. The
console states it was last calculated on the 19th Spetember 2007.
(Apoligies if there are other threads on the same subjetc but i can't
seem to trace them)

Where do you get this error message?
Did you look at the robots.txt analysis page
in the Tools of Google Webmaster Tools
and at your server access logs and error logs?

Cristina.

Hi silverstall--

A search for [cache:www.amberstall.com] shows that your homepage was
last cached on 22 September, so it looks like we've been able to
access it since the error was reported. The Googlebot may have just
stopped by during a momentary error on the 19th, but then come back on
the 22nd and been able to access your site and robots.txt file without
problems. To verify that this is the case, you could look at the
robots.txt analysis tool in webmaster tools to see if it reports a
"Last downloaded" date more recent than the 19th. If so, everything
should be fine and it may just take awhile for that error to disappear
from your "Web crawl" list.

If you're still concerned about it, keep an eye on the "Last
Calculated" date of the error you're seeing and feel free to post back
here if it becomes more recent.

Hi Christina - the error appears in the "Unreachable URLs" of
webmaster tools.

Hi Susan - the robots.txt analysis does confirm that it was last
downloaded on the 27th sept. without problems - (sorry i did not think
of checking that tool - distracted by US ladies football team being
cheated by Brazil). The error message is still there however as you
say it ought to disappear over time.

Many thanks to both of you for your kind support.