The trope about withdrawing to a remote mountain escarpment to channel your inner wisdom is as old as the mountains themselves. Assuming you’re not at high altitude yourself right now, cut off from society – if not social media, and with Wi-Fi given you’re still able to read this – there’s a vast stack of literature you can clamber up to glean knowledge yourself, from Mr Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard and Mr Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums back to the 2,400-year-old clay tablets found in the Zagros Mountains of Iran. Art history itself has been founded around the foothills of the great peaks, from Mr Katsushika Hokusai’s “Thirty-Six Views Of Mount Fuji” series to the ethereal vistas Mr Leonardo da Vinci captured after scaling the Alps.

Closer to the heavens, where the air is not so enriched with oxygen, mountaintops often have a connection to spiritual enlightenment. As such, higher ground repeatedly features in religious texts or writings of a higher purpose, from the dwelling of the hermit who predicted the ascendance of Prince Siddhartha as the great chakravartin to the Olympus hangout of the Greek gods. It was in a mountain cave where Muhammad – who later called for Mount Safa to come to him instead – received his first revelation from God, and up Mount Sinai was where Moses found the stone tablets on which the big guy scrawled his Ten Commandments. That big gap in Jesus of Nazareth’s CV? You can bet there was at least one hiking excursion involved.

Closer to home – MR PORTER’s London dwelling, that is – the hills and headlands of Britain took hold in the art of the Romantic movement and its adjacent poets such as Mr William Wordsworth. And while the British Isles might have no peak to trouble the ranges that fringe the Tibetan Plateau, it punches above its weight in terms of cultural output. The maritime climate means that the weather can turn on a dime (almost 8p in the ailing domestic currency), as anyone who has tried to picnic in the otherwise pulchritudinous Lake District can confirm (although the local preserves and chutneys probably make it worthwhile). And don’t forget that prior to summiting Everest, Sir Edmund Hillary and Mr Tenzing Norgay warmed up for the big one with training exercises on the slopes of Snowdon in North Wales.

That one of the foremost purveyors of clothing for mountaineers hails from Sheffield in South Yorkshire should come as no surprise, then. For the best part of 40 years, Rab has been top of the heap. Founded in 1981 by Scottish climber Mr Rab Carrington, the brand’s own origin story goes back further to 1973, when Mr Carrington was part of an expedition to Patagonia. Upon arrival in Buenos Aires, his party discovered that, due to a dock strike, their equipment had not been shipped from Liverpool. Rather than turn back though, the climber stayed in Argentina for six months, where he learnt how to fashion his own sleeping bag. This proved to be a valuable skill once he eventually did return home and relocate to Sheffield due to its proximity to the Peak District, the epicentre – if a relative wilderness can be described as such – of the UK’s fast-growing climbing scene.

From handstitching and selling his own range of sleeping bags, Mr Carrington expanded into an entire kitbag that a climber could rely on: down jackets, waterproof jackets, trousers and overtrousers, gloves, base layers and even tents. “Nothing fancy or over-engineered,” the company reports in a manner that implies it should be spoken in a Yorkshire accent, “just honest, hardworking pieces that you’d rather repair than replace. By climbers for climbers.” Which is indeed the case. And while it might not shout about it – OK, the very tasty tomato-red down jacket speaks a little louder than most – each piece is built to hold its own at the top of the world.

No wonder Rab’s employees call themselves, like the Super Furry Animals song, “the mountain people”. Although for once, this wisdom was attained through not being able to go up the mountain at all.