Peter Ross: Black arts of the chimney sweep are safe with Auld Reekie

KIRK McLenaghan is standing on the roof of a Victorian country house near Penicuik.

He has his feet on the slope of a turret and his arms folded on top of the chimney stack with all the apparent ease and contentment of a practised drinker leaning on the bar of a favourite pub. I'm sitting astride the ridge of the roof, a position which numbs the buttocks in moments and chills the blood even faster. Kirk reckons we're only about 30ft up, and as he has been sweeping chimneys for that same number of years I'm inclined to trust his judgment, but it feels to me like we're twice that high.

"There must be easier ways to make a living," Kirk says, but he's only joking. He loves being a chimney sweep. "It's all I've ever known."

Now 37, he began sweeping as a boy of eight, going out on jobs with his grandad, who had started in the trade before the Second World War and was still working until his mid-70s. Kirk's father, Michael, was a sweep, too. Now he has a firm of his own, Auld Reekie. As the name suggests, he's based in Edinburgh, with premises in Gorgie next to where his grandad kept a shop. Tradition is important to him. Family, too. His wife, Fiona, does the admin, and his 14-year-old daughter has been out a few times. He likes keeping the old techniques going. In the 1950s there were 400 sweeps in Edinburgh. Now there is only a handful.

I meet Kirk early in the morning in his shop and he introduces his team.

Sid Mutch is a big guy of 41 with short silver hair and an ear-ring. He worked as a labourer before turning sweep four years ago. He likes it well enough, but there is a drawback. "I hate my hands getting dirty," he confesses. "I've got a wee nail brush, and I wear plastic gloves under my other gloves. Funny, isn't it, a sweep that hates dirt?"

His workmate, Albert Boat, is the opposite. "I love getting dirty... proves I've been working." Albert, known as "Bert" or "the wee man", is 48 and 4ft 2in. To fit him, his overalls are cut off at the knees and bound round his wrists with strong tape.

Bert had an eventful career before Kirk hired him nine years ago. He was a clown in the circus, playing five-a-side with a pack of boxer dogs, but the pay was poor and he soon packed it in. He also played a Jawa in the first Star Wars film, spending six months filming in Tunisia. "It was great, mate," he recalls. "I wish I was young now; I could have been in Lord Of The Rings."

"Aye," says Sid, wryly, "you could have been a dwarf."

"No' a dwarf," says Bert. "I'd be a hobbit."

Sid looks askance. "You wouldn't be a hobbit. You'd be one of those other ones."

Bert rolls his eyes. "See what I have to put up with?"

The first job of the morning is at half-eight. Auld Reekie will sweep eight homes today and finish up at about four in the afternoon. You'd think chimney sweeping was finished as a trade, but in fact it's getting busier. There's a growing trend for getting your coal fire put back in, and lots of people are getting wood-burning stoves for environmental reasons.

I get in the van beside Kirk and we drive to a house in Craiglockhart. The ladders rattle on the roof as he explains the various bits of slang sweeps use for their equipment. The round brush that everyone knows is a "dolly heid"; a small ladder is a "jinky"; the blanket protecting the room from billowing soot is a "touky"; a "big switch" is what they call a 3ft brush with bristles standing out on either side.

Bert and Sid are "bottomers", meaning they work on ground level at the fireplace; Kirk, as the senior man, is the "roper" – the guy on the roof. He's totally at ease up there and regards it almost as a mountaineering challenge; the trick is to find the best route to the summit. When he was younger he would sometimes lasso the chimney and climb the walls on his rope.

Today is lovely and sunny but Kirk goes up in all weathers, winter being a sweep's busiest season. "You get such a buzz when you're up there and it's windy," he says. "You're having to jam yourself between the chimneys just to stay on, and the adrenalin is surging." He fell off a roof once but luckily it was a bungalow and he was fine. Sweeping isn't the safest profession, though it's not like the old days when the man on the roof would sometimes drink on the job and then leap the metre gap between tenements rather than go down the ladder. It's not uncommon to find empty bottles of whisky in attics, left there long ago by bevvied sweeps.

It's fascinating to watch them work. Kirk climbs on to the roof and lowers through the flue a dolly heid weighted down by a heavy metal ball. This has to be done cannily so the soot doesn't get pushed down too fast and the ball doesn't crack the fireplace. Meanwhile, Bert is down in the living room, his head leaning right on the tiles above the fire. The grate is covered with the touky and he has to listen carefully to how fast the soot is coming and where the ball might be. He and Kirk communicate by a series of calls unchanged for centuries. "Hee-hee-hee!" they shout back and forth, each understanding the other perfectly. When the ball reaches just above the fire, Sid bellows "Heee-up!" and Kirk starts pulling the brush back. Listening to this is like eavesdropping on a previous century.

Kirk is very conscious that, through the work he does, he is tied to the past, and he loves that feeling, loves cleaning chimneys his grandad once cleaned. On the roof in Penicuik he discovers the signature of a sweep scratched in the lead – "D McIntosh, 1877". There's something moving about that. We all turn to dust eventually, our lives swept away, but people like Kirk, who keep traditions alive, can sometimes give us a glimpse of eternity. As the saying goes: "Lang may yer lum reek". And as they add in some parts: "wi' other fowk's coal".