These are the East Steps, rising from Blind Man's Cove on the island's eastern side and threading upward through a lintelled passage, a low stone doorway capped with a horizontal slab, before entering the Lower Monks' Garden and continuing on into the monastic enclosure above. Each step is a flag of stone, between one and one and a half metres wide and roughly ten to twenty centimetres in height, laid onto a foundation of coursed stonework. The construction is entirely consistent with the demanding logic of early medieval monastic life on a near-vertical Atlantic rock.

For centuries this route lay partially buried and incomplete. Excavation and conservation work carried out in 2001 uncovered the full run of surviving steps and repaired those that had been damaged, revealing the extent of what had been hidden beneath accumulated rubble and soil. The lower section, however, was beyond recovery: it had been destroyed in the 1820s during the construction of a lighthouse road, one of several interventions from that period that altered the island's lower terrain. Work in 2002 at the base of the steps uncovered the remains of a building, suggesting that the foot of this route was once marked by some form of structure, though what purpose it served remains unclear. The steps connect what would have been an arrival point from the sea to one of the most remote monastic settlements in early Christian Europe, a community of monks who occupied this extraordinary outcrop, most likely from the sixth or seventh century onwards.