It is approximately three metres long and, at its narrowest point, just twenty centimetres wide. That is roughly the width of a human foot. The ridge is steep-sided and runs eastward from just below the summit, and pilgrims once walked it.

The destination at the eastern end of this slender passage was a standing stone known as "The Spit." Charles Smith noted the pilgrimage route in 1756, suggesting the practice was still known, if not still active, in the mid-eighteenth century. The ridge itself was documented in detail by Horn and colleagues in 1990 and again by O'Sullivan and Sheehan in 1996. That a feature barely the length of a car and no wider than a hand-span should be formally catalogued as a road says something about the extremity of the landscape it crosses. Skellig Michael, eight miles off the Kerry coast, was home to an early medieval monastic community who built their beehive cells and oratories on near-vertical rock faces, and the idea that a spine of stone a fifth of a metre across constituted a pilgrim path fits entirely with the island's logic of difficult devotion.

The ridge sits near the summit of the South Peak, well above the better-known monastic enclosure that most visitors reach via the ancient stone stairways. Access to the South Peak area is considerably more demanding than the main site, and the exposed position of this feature means that what reads as a modest archaeological footnote would, in person, involve a very different reckoning with height and exposure.