Known as the Lower Monks' Garden, the feature was long assumed to consist of two separate terraces divided by a wall, the north-eastern portion recorded by O'Sullivan and Sheehan in 1996 as a distinct and poorly preserved element. Excavation work eventually showed this reading to be wrong. The two terraces were originally one continuous space, artificially separated by a wall built in the nineteenth century, and the north-eastern section had simply been misread as something independent.

The full picture only emerged during a fourteen-week excavation carried out between May and August 1994, undertaken in advance of conservation works. When a large area at the eastern end of the garden was opened up, archaeologists found themselves working through up to 4.5 metres of collapse, much of it rubble from the partial fall of Saint Michael's Church and the inner wall of the garden itself. The sheer weight of this accumulated debris had pushed outward, bringing down the eastern end of the outer garden wall and disturbing much of the stratigraphy close to it. Beneath all of this, at the base of the cutting, excavators uncovered a substantial clochán, the dry-stone beehive hut characteristic of early Irish monasticism, along with an area of stone paving. The clochán proved to have had an unexpected later resident: it had been occupied by the builders who constructed the lighthouse on the island in the 1820s, and was ultimately destroyed when the collapse above it came down. Alongside the clochán, the dig revealed stepping stones running on a north-east to south-west axis, an enclosure, a smaller terrace, and a raised platform. Traces of an even earlier building were detected in the section face at the outer edge of the garden, though it lay beneath the paving associated with the clochán and could not be properly investigated.