A vivid vista from Mount Misery looking down over Waterford City and the old bridge in 1974, published by the famous John Hinde Studios in Dublin.

The image featured in a 2008 TG4 programme called ‘Cártaí Poist’’ (Postcards in Irish) which set out to recreate some of the evocative scenes that made their way around the world.

Back in the 1960s and early ’70s, Hinde’s romantic postcards, with their saturated colour and cleverly pitched composition, were regular features of most Irish households, home and away, along with a framed photograph of Pope John, JFK, and a picture of the Sacred Heart, complete with “eternal” red lamp.

After something of a wild goose chase, the mystery man in the red shirt was tracked down by Pauline Scanlon, a researcher with the Adare Productions team. After three or four men phoned her claiming to be “him”, she contacted photographer Peter O’Toole, who took the shot.

“They’re all wrong, because it’s actually myself,” he told her, explaining how he’d set up a tripod and his brother pressed the button because “He wouldn’t get in it himself!”

As Peter was away on holiday, he couldn’t do a double take for the programme, but a member of Waterford Golf Club, the late and ever-courteous Dick Hayden, Ferrybank, kindly took Pauline to the very place and snapped her at the same spot Peter had been pictured 34 years before.

However, nearly a quarter-century old, Redmond Bridge had been replaced by the current Rice Bridge a decade after the original photo was taken.

The very first landscape painting of any Irish city, commissioned by Waterford Corporation from the artist Willem van der Hagen in 1736, depicted Urbs Intacta from the very same vantage point. It now hangs in the drawing room of the Bishop’s Palace.