Peter Ross at large: The briar brothers

“I love smoking the pipe,” says Myles Williamson, 53, a carer from Condorrat, Cumbernauld, who favours corncobs. “I love buying pipes, I love trying different tobaccos. It’s relaxation. You have to take your time to smoke a pipe. Your mind just drifts. I am an amateur radio ham and I’ve got a wee shack out the back. I sit there in my chair and get my pipe going and talk to people all over the world. It’s magic.”

The Edinburgh Pipe Club was founded last year by Peter Jones, who is 44, drives a bin lorry for a living, shaves with a straight razor, and is proud to wear a T-shirt which reads “Keep Calm And Smoke A Pipe”. It is very much a fledgling organisation with just ten members, aged from their mid-twenties to late-sixties, and drawn from a range of professions. None of them knew each other beforehand; the common ground is a burning love for pipes.

It is impossible, of course, to imagine such a thing as a Cigarette Club – fags are too common, and too tainted by their association with addiction and death. But pipes? There is something about a pipe, and the relatively small numbers of its acolytes, which lends itself to the idea of groups. The “brotherhood of the briar” is what one hears often amongst pipemen. It is a useful term, with something monkish and fraternal about it. Jones is keen on quoting a Victorian doctor on the subject of pipes: “Nowhere in the world will such a brotherly feeling of confidence be experienced as amongst those who sit together smoking their pipes.”

I can’t say with complete honesty that confidence and fraternity are chief among my sensations as I sit with Jones and watch him puff out great hazy clouds of blue smoke. The main thing I feel is cold. For the fact must be faced that today’s pipemen, when they gather in public to smoke, must do so outdoors. A smoker’s “outfit” once referred to pipe, pipe-cleaners, pouch, matches, tobacco and tamper. To this list, since the smoking ban, we must now add warm clothing: a tweed stalking cape, perhaps, or the rather more prosaic thermal fleece.

Yet Jones seems quite happy and stoical, sitting in the smoking shelter of The Cuddie Brae, a pub in the Newcraighall suburb of Edinburgh, pipe clenched in gob, pint of Guinness on the table. “You mentally change down a gear when you smoke a pipe,” he says in his laconic way. “You can’t smoke a pipe in a hurry. A pipe smoker could never, ever suffer from road rage.”

There are half a dozen pipe clubs in the UK – Edinburgh being the only one in Scotland; the overarching body, the Pipe Club of Great Britain, was extinguished in 1978. Of late, the story of pipe-smoking in this country has very much been one of decline. The British brothers of the briar lag behind their international brethren. In America there are 24 pipe clubs, including the Sherlock Holmes Pipe Club of Boston. Next month, the Pipe Smoking World Cup will be held in Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

Hard to imagine, but a century ago, four-fifths of all the tobacco smoked in the UK was smoked in pipes. Yet you rarely see a pipe-smoker now. On Thursday I walked the length of Princes Street and saw just one: an old man doddering past the Scott Monument with a metal-stemmed Falcon between his teeth; he had a smoky halo above his bunnet and seemed, like all pipemen, lost in his own swirling thoughts. The word for the small piece of unburned tobacco left in the bowl of a smoked pipe is “dottle”, and so it seems appropriate to think of Britain’s few remaining pipemen as dottles – a remnant of a culture which has largely gone up in smoke.

There are, however, some younger folk taking up the pipe. Cameron Black, a member of the Edinburgh Pipe Club, is 27 and very at ease with his Viking Classic pipe. “Once, I was walking along the road smoking a pipe and someone said, ‘You’re too young!’ ” he laughs. “But I quite like the eccentricity of it, and the paraphernalia and the ritual. You are harking back to yesteryear and you definitely think you might be able to write books like C S Lewis.”

I am 38 and have never had any interest in smoking cigarettes, but I can see the attraction in a pipe, especially as it would give me an excuse to visit a tobacconist. I love tobacconists, in part for their literary associations. The writing of George Orwell (a six ounces a week man) is full of tobacconists and the smell of tobacco, among other far less pleasant aromas. J B Priestley was named Pipe Smoker of the Year in 1979; his archive at the University of Bradford includes more than 70 of his pipes, as well as pouches, tins and other piperly accoutrements.

The Pipe Shop in Edinburgh is one of three specialist tobacconists in the city. Were you foolish enough to wander down Leith Walk while blindfolded, you could identify The Pipe Shop just by sniffing. It smells of tobacco, yes, but not the acrid, choking stink of cigarettes. The complex aroma of The Pipe Shop seems to arrive on the back of the tongue, containing within it notes of rum, vanilla, old leather, stewed tea, damp dog, beloved grandfather, second-hand book, mud, mushrooms and autumnal walks in the woods. It smells solid and dependable and tremendously inviting.

The shop was founded in 1957 and has been run for the last 30 years by Alan Myerthall. Like pipe-smokers, tobacconists are in decline. There are around 60 independent tobacconists in the UK, half the number there were just 25 years ago. Yet The Pipe Shop appears to be thriving, packed – like a well-filled bowl – with customers when I visit late on a Wednesday morning.

As well as offering pipes, Cuban cigars, tobacco, snuff and so on, it sells bongs and king-size rolling papers, and therefore caters to a thoroughly mixed crowd from pinstriped businessmen to pale young women wearing sunglasses indoors to rasp-voiced old coves asking, “Huv ye ony o’ yon baccy ye flake yersel’?”

In response to this enquiry, a bag is fetched from beneath the counter. Within it is a coiled, moist length of “black twist”, looking more like some sort of gourmet sausage than tobacco. A portion is cut off with a small wooden-handled knife, weighed and then sold to the man, who takes his prize off home to smoke, or perhaps to chew as old sailors sometimes do. Next in line is a young French man with long hair and a beard, spending £160 on four pipes to take home to friends. “For pipe-smokers, this place is a Mecca,” says one of the sales assistants.

Myerthall gives me the tour. He is a short, stout man of 65 with gold rings and good humour. He leads the way past the glass jars of loose aromatic tobacco (coconut, black cherry, liquorice, etc) in the half of the shop given over to pipes. The range is dizzying: rustic briars, long-stemmed churchwardens and elaborate meerschaums with bowls carved into the shape of grim reapers, flamboyant pirates and snarling spaniels.

He lifts a beautifully polished pipe, not too large, with a reddish-brown bowl and a lovely swirling grain. “A pipe like that is a work of art,” he says, “and a really good smoke. It was made by hand from scratch by one man, Ian Walker, a total artisan who works on a barge. It’s like buying a Savile Row suit.”

The pipe in question costs £65. “But you can pay up to £1,000 for a pipe. If you’re daft enough.”

Why would anyone need more than one pipe? “Pipes are like shoes,” Myerthall explains. “If you wear the same pair of shoes all the time they get soggy and uncomfortable. It’s the same with pipes. The minimum amount of pipes you should have is two. You smoke a pipe for a day and then rest it for a day.”

Jim Lilley, a bluff and bewhiskered gentleman of 65, would not be content with two. He is a collector of pipes made by the long-established Irish manufacturer Peterson. He owns somewhere in the region of 400 pipes, of which he smokes between 20 and 30 on a rotational basis. The obsession has its roots, he thinks, in a memory of his Irish grandfather, a pipe-smoker.

“The pipes have a charisma that appeals to me,” he says. “They are like a time machine. Looking, touching, feeling these pipes, some of which are 145 years old, I get the essence of the times. I find them very aesthetically pleasing – the classical shapes, the elegance, the simplicity. I see them as art objects.”

Lilley smokes pipes smoked by men long dead, happy in the knowledge that one day he too will be gone and the pipes will pass to other lips. He sits for hours on end outside his home, contemplating the Dumfriesshire countryside, puffing away, the latest in a long line of pipemen drifting through the centuries like ghosts, like ash, like smoke.

“I don’t own these pipes,” he says. “I am just their custodian.”