On the steep north-west-facing slopes, overlooking Blue Cove, a series of steps cuts into and across the rock face, forming a route that predates any modern notion of a visitor path. These are not casual improvements to a difficult hillside. They are a considered piece of engineering, beginning as steps cut directly from the living rock and continuing as stone flags laid onto a foundation of coursed stonework, each step roughly one to one and a half metres wide and between ten and twenty centimetres high.

The steps rise from the northern landing, tracking first to the north-north-east before turning southward toward Christ's Valley, the low ground between the island's two peaks. That change in direction is not incidental. It reflects a practical response to the island's severe topography, guiding those ascending away from the most exposed and vertical sections of the slope. Rock-cut steps of this kind, where the builders work with the natural surface before supplementing it with dressed stone, are found at a number of early medieval monastic sites in Ireland, though few occupy terrain as demanding as this. On Skellig Michael, where early Christian monks established one of the most remote religious communities in the North Atlantic, the ability to move safely between the landing points and the higher ground was not a matter of comfort but of survival.