Far fewer know that a second, more demanding route once led climbers toward the South Peak, following a path with names that carry their own austere poetry: from Christ's Saddle to the Needle's Eye.

The route, documented in detail by Horn, White Marshall, and Rourke in their 1990 study of what they called the forgotten hermitage of Skellig Michael, begins at the lowest point of Christ's Saddle, the col between the island's two peaks. From there, a green slope climbs to a narrow ridge connecting the South Peak with a massive outcropping of rock to the south. At the northern end of that ridge, where it meets the South Peak itself, the ascent becomes more demanding. A short, steep cleft in the rock, containing the remains of masonry steps, opens onto a natural ledge that spirals around the western face of the peak. The stonework here is fragmentary, the ledge exposed, and the destination, the Needle's Eye, suggests exactly the kind of vertiginous narrowness the name implies. The masonry points to deliberate construction, most likely by the monks who inhabited the island and who, by reaching the South Peak, were seeking something beyond the already considerable isolation of the main monastery.

The phrase "forgotten hermitage" is telling. While the beehive cells and oratories of the main monastic enclosure have long been celebrated, the South Peak and its associated structures represent a more extreme form of withdrawal, a place where even the community of the monastery would have been left behind. The surviving steps in the cleft are a physical remnant of that intention, evidence that someone, at some point, went to considerable effort to make an almost impossibly difficult ascent just slightly less so.