Far fewer are aware that on the western side of the South Peak, in a position described as the most exposed and difficult to reach on the entire island, early monks constructed a terrace of drystone walling along the outer edges of three irregular rock ledges. The ledges themselves differ in elevation by up to four metres, and the wall running across them stretches seventeen metres in length, its external face surviving to a height of 3.2 metres at one point. That anyone built here at all, let alone built carefully, is the first thing that stops you.

Drystone construction, which uses no mortar and relies entirely on the skill of the builder to interlock stones so they hold under their own weight and the pressure of wind and weather, is common enough in early medieval Irish monasticism. What distinguishes this structure is the evident care taken on such an inhospitable surface: the wall has smooth faces and a consistent thickness of between 0.6 and 0.8 metres throughout. Horn, White Marshall, and Rourke, writing in their 1990 study of what they termed the forgotten hermitage of Skellig Michael, proposed that a small shelter may once have occupied the south-western angle of the terrace, a theory supported by a patch of rough paving found there. At the northern end, a roughly shaped stone measuring 0.48 by 0.25 metres was recovered, identified as a fragment of a broken stone cross. Together, the paving and the cross suggest this was not simply a functional platform but a place deliberately set apart for prayer or solitary retreat, perched at the outer limit of what a human being could reasonably occupy.