The south steps, cut from stone flags and laid on a foundation of coursed stonework, are between one and one and a half metres wide, with individual risers of just ten to twenty centimetres, a shallow rhythm suited to people carrying things, or moving carefully in wind. They rise from the south landing, winding upward to the northwest until they reach a point known as Christ's Valley, or the Saddle, a col between the island's two peaks, where they meet the steps coming up from the north landing. From there, the combined route continues northeast and eventually joins the east steps, arriving outside the lintelled entrance to the main monastic enclosure.

The path forms part of a network of hand-built routes that allowed the early medieval monks of Sceilg Mhichíl to move around a rock that offers almost no natural footing. A lintelled entrance is simply a doorway spanned by a single horizontal stone rather than an arch, and its presence here signals a level of deliberate construction that extends far beyond the famous beehive cells at the summit. The south steps are not a later addition or a convenience for visitors; they are woven into the same architectural logic as the monastery itself. Their continuity with steps from both the north and east landings suggests the whole system was conceived as an integrated approach to a single sacred centre. A disruption arrived in the 1820s, when a lighthouse road was constructed close to the shoreline and cut directly across this flight of steps, leaving the ancient route interrupted by an infrastructure built for an entirely different purpose.