Fewer know that a second, far more exposed religious structure once stood on the South Peak, roughly two hundred metres above the Atlantic and only fifteen metres below the summit, on a narrow terrace cut into the cliff-face. This is not the famous monastery. It is something older-feeling, more extreme, the kind of place that raises immediate questions about who would have chosen to build there, and why.

What survives is a drystone oratory, the remains of a small, rectangular, roofless prayer-house built without mortar from the island's own stone. Internally it measured just 2.1 metres wide. The north-east end has largely gone, lost when the revetment wall supporting the terrace beneath it subsided and collapsed. What remains are the south-west end-wall, a stretch of the north-west side-wall, and a fragment of the opposite face. The surviving walls stand to internal heights of between 0.95 and 1.2 metres, and the inner face of the north-west wall is corbelled, meaning the stones were laid with a slight inward lean, a technique used across the island to shed water and, in complete structures, to form a self-supporting roof without timber. A doorway 0.57 metres wide survives in the end-wall, its threshold slabs still in place. Just inside the entrance lies a long flat slab measuring roughly one metre by 0.45 metres, which may be a fallen lintel. The plinth on which the end-wall was built continues along the north-west side, where it doubles as a path leading to steps cut directly into the rock-face, ascending to a natural ledge above. Outside the south-west corner, a section of the terrace's original paved surface is also preserved. The structure was described and documented in detail by Horn, White Marshall, and Rourke in their 1990 study of what they called the forgotten hermitage of Skellig Michael, a phrase that captures the degree to which this upper site had been overlooked in favour of the main enclosure below.