Above Blind Man's Cove, on the steep slope at the foot of the East Steps, a small stone building went entirely unnoticed beneath encroaching vegetation until 2002. It was only when that vegetation was cleared that the outline of a rectangular structure became visible, pressed against the outer face of the ancient stepped path that climbs the rock.

Excavation in 2002 and 2003, carried out under Bourke, established that the building is subrectangular, roughly five metres by two and a half, and that part of it has since been lost to the sea as the slope eroded away. Burnt spreads found during excavation suggest the structure was used, not merely built and abandoned, and the broader material evidence places its occupation in the Early Christian period, broadly the sixth to twelfth centuries, during which the island's monastic community was active. The most arresting find came from beneath the building's threshold: a cross-slab, a flat stone incised with a cross, of the kind commonly associated with early Irish ecclesiastical sites. Whether it was placed there deliberately as a kind of foundation deposit, or simply incorporated into the structure during construction, is not recorded. That it sat hidden under the doorway until the twenty-first century gives it a particular quiet weight. The building itself, now partially suspended over open water, was already peripheral to the main monastic enclosure above; the cross-slab beneath its entrance makes it stranger still.