My guess (and it is only that) is that the public will never see the actual report by SKANSKA, and that EH if they do issue a report will reference it without making it available - commercial confidence and intellectual property being the blankets they will use to keep it under wraps.

£1m seems a small amount in commercial terms for that many people and that technology for so long....and a large amount for taxpayers as Nigel rightly says has got little news let alone a result out of it. I don't gamble but i bet its more....££££s more !

I am not supposed to be on here - apologies everyone, I got excited and joined in.

VBB

"Well reading there web site I got the impression that this survey Was the Skanska report!"

Pete, you were quite right to have the wrong impression.

For the record, it works like this:

The page on recent investigations in the South West region says....
"Our recent investigation, PROMPTED BY THE COLLAPSE of an excavation dug in 1776, drew attention to some important and intriguing characteristics of the mound that have always previously been overlooked. More...." (this then links to an account of both the analytical survey and the later Skanska one)
...Which says this: "At an early stage in this multi-disciplinary project, English Heritage's Landscape Investigation Team undertook an analytical survey - remarkably, the first of its kind - of the earthworks of the mound and its surrounding area. This has produced some very intriguing results! All the new information now available will help English Heritage to plan for this unique monument's continued preservation."

There is no question that paragraph one would lead the public to believe that the earlier analytical survey was part of the response to the collapse and paragraph two would lead them to believe that it was an integral part of their search for a solution. You certainly thought so, and so did I. If VBB is right and this earlier survey was pre-scheduled for purely archaeological reasons (and he/she must be, since the report does not even mention the collapse) then their website is worded in such a way that people would gain an erroneous impression.

I'm sure it was just a mistake and the result of poor drafting, but since it resulted in you, me and the general public thinking that by late 2001 they had learned a lot about the stability of the whole hill when in fact, incredibly, the reverse was patently the case, I think it was a scandalous mistake to have made. It'll be interesting to see if the wording is rectified.