Some of the better estate maps of 18th-century Ireland – especially those produced by the French school of land-surveyors – have recently received welcome attention from a number of Irish geographers. There are extensive areas of 18th and of early 19th-century Ireland, however, which are either not covered, or only poorly served, in relation to such rich cartographic source-materials. As Andrews has noted 'most Irish land-surveyors of the pre-Ordnance period concentrated on simple outline maps of tenement boundaries and were both niggardly and arbitrary in their choice of interior detail. Since maps do constitute the most important single body of evidence for the historical geographer, his task is further frustrated in the Irish context by the loss of quite a number of estate map collections which seem to have disappeared without trace. The objective of this paper, therefore, is simply to draw geographers' attention to the diverse range of estate documentary material – other than estate maps – which can either provide important clues towards the explanation of territorial patterns illustrated on contemporary estate atlases or which – as in this example – can be used in the absence of such maps to build up at least a general picture of the evolution of the rural landscape.