Succession is about more than who gets the farm. It’s also about passing on identity, family history and a sense of belonging.

When we talk about succession, we think about land, livestock and assets – nowhere more so than in farming families – and there is no denying their importance, not just for the emotional weight land carries, but for the practicalities of the next generation to make a living.

Land deeds matter – it’s life and livelihood – but other deeds matter too and it got me thinking about what else we pass on, things that can’t be measured in hectares or euros but are equally important.

I’ve reached an age where I have cleared out all the houses I am ever likely to clear. The generation before me is now tucked away in my memory, their remains resting in the Church of Ireland graveyard my house overlooks, and where I visit often, particularly when I have something on my mind.

What surprised me, when I cleared out first my dad’s house, and then my aunts and uncles, was how little really mattered in the end. That furniture that I’d been giving the side-eye to for years? Well, there’s only so much room for inherited possessions. My walls can take no more art or framed photographs, and my bookshelves can barely contain my own books, nevermind the words enjoyed by the previous generation.

And that’s before we get to the personal items – impossible to throw away, yet impossible to hold on to either. The wartime letters written between my grandparents, the birthday cards, the old diaries, the scribbled notes in kitchen drawers – fragments of the lives of those who went before me.

The stories rooted in fields and hedgerows, the skills learned at kitchen tables and in farmyards, the values absorbed from the generations before us

The things I did hold onto make for an eclectic mix: a weathered box of Monopoly, with its racing car that always seemed destined to drive me to jail while my brother built yet another hotel on Mayfair; an incomplete set of side plates that once carried the slices of cake my granny made for our Sunday afternoon visits; a lopsided pottery hedgehog my small hands had made for Dad, which sat proudly on his office desk; and, of course, a battered biscuit tin filled with sepia photographs of long-dead relatives, unnamed but far too precious to throw away.

None of these things has any monetary value, yet each carries something far more important – a memory, a connection, a story, reminding us that what we inherit is often far more valuable than the object itself.

James W Loewen wrote that some African societies divide humanity into three groups – first the living; then the ‘Sasha’, who remain alive in the memories of those who knew them; and finally the ‘Zamani ’who die only when the last person who remembers them also dies.

I love that idea. That we can keep people alive through stories and sayings, recipes and acts of remembrance. Through using their words and their phrases, mixing dough for the next generation the way it was mixed for us, and telling our children stories about grandparents they never got to meet yet whose DNA they carry.

In that way, succession is about more than transferring ownership. It is about passing on identity, values and a sense of where we come from.

Because that really matters. The stories rooted in fields and hedgerows, the skills learned at kitchen tables and in farmyards, the values absorbed from the generations before us.

Many of the things inherited in farming families are never written into wills or deeds. They are passed on quietly: how to know when rain is coming, how to calm a nervous animal, which field dries first in spring, or the importance of stopping to help a neighbour. They become part of us long before we realise we are learning them and stay with us long after those who taught them are gone.

The battered biscuit tin still sits in my cupboard. I will never know the names of many of the faded faces in those photographs, but they belonged to someone who loved them enough to keep them, and now I do too. One day I will pass them on. That too is succession – an inheritance that is absolutely priceless.