This paper, presented at the Regional Heritage Centre's event, 'Maps and the Landscape – distortion and reality', presents two case studies that illustrate the benefits of using digital technologies in the assessment of historic maps. The first case study details the development and evolution of small-scale mapping in sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Ireland, and the second, exemplifies how we can use quantitative techniques to provide new insight into map-making and surveying during the Plantation of Ulster.