Winchester Cathedral

Another magnificent British cathedral. Winchester Cathedral has a bunch of interesting things about it, but most of all it is huge, and magnificent.
Fact #1 - It is overall, the longest church in Europe.
Fact #2 - It was used as the Vatican in the movie, 'The DiVinci Code'
Fact #3 - There was a #1 pop hit called, "Winchester Cathedral" written about it in 1966. Horrible song - with whistling and a singer singing through a megaphone!
Fact #4 - There was another song done by Crosby, Stills and Nash called 'Cathedral' that is so good, I have it on my iPod right now. (not, unfortunately a major hit)
Fact #5 But the most interesting story happened in the early 1900's. The church, the construction of which was begun in 1079, was built on muddy soil and it was at risk of collapsing. So they had to pump out the water around the foundation and reinforce it, but that was likely to collapse the south and east walls of the cathedral. Enter William Walker.
(copied from Wikipedia)

"In his time, William Walker was the most experienced diver of Siebe Gorman Ltd. Working in water up to a depth of 6 m between 1906-1911, he shored up the Cathedral using more than 25,000 bags of concrete, 115,000 concrete blocks and 900,000 bricks.

Prior to his work, the Cathedral had been in imminent danger of collapse as it slowly sank into the ground, which consisted of peat. To enable bricklayers to build supporting walls, the groundwater level had to be lowered. Normally, the removal of the groundwater would have caused the collapse of the building. So to give temporary support to the foundation walls some 235 pits were dug out along the southern and eastern sides of the building, each about six metres deep. Walker went down and shored up the walls by putting concrete underneath them. He had to work six hours a day in complete darkness as the water contained floating sediment and was impenetrable to light.

After Walker finished his work, the groundwater was pumped out and the concrete Walker had put into place bore the foundation walls. Then conventional bricklayers were able to do their work the usual way and restore the damaged walls."
There are pictures of this guy actually doing this. He would work all week in Winchester, and then cycle 150 miles home for the weekends.

The center picture is a statue of William Walker in Winchester Cathedral - 'The Man Who Saved the Cathedral.'