Sitting in a secluded marshy valley with high ground closing in on three sides, the settlement takes its name from the Irish Fobhair, meaning a spring or well, a reference to a water source that still emerges from a rock on the south side of the village known as Carraig Bhaile Fhobhair. That spring gave the place its identity long before the first stone was laid, and the landscape itself, low, hemmed-in, and quietly damp, seems to explain both why early monastics chose it and why later inhabitants found it so difficult to defend.

The monastery here was founded by St Feichin, most likely sometime in the second quarter of the seventh century. It grew into a prosperous community, prosperous enough to be burned or raided on at least sixteen separate occasions between 745 and 1176, a frequency that says as much about the monastery's wealth as it does about the instability of early medieval Ireland. In 1172, Hugh de Lacy received Fore as part of his liberty of Meath and, in that same year, spent a fortnight at the settlement and burned the monastery himself. By around 1180 he had effectively occupied it, and a motte and bailey castle, a raised earthen mound with an attached enclosure used as a Norman military base, was probably constructed between then and 1186. A Benedictine priory was established before 1185, and by around 1235 the settlement had achieved borough status. Ownership passed through several hands over the following centuries, from the de Lacy family to Geoffrey de Geneville, then to Roger de Mortimer in 1308, and eventually to Richard, duke of York, on whose death in 1460 it reverted to the crown. By the fifteenth century Fore had become a vulnerable frontier town. The priory was burned in 1423 and the town itself around 1432; Henry VI responded by granting murage, the right to collect tolls for the repair and construction of town walls, a grant reaffirmed by Edward IV in 1462 to 1463. By 1682, a contemporary observer described the town as "very mean" and its inhabitants as living in small cottages.

The physical remains today are scattered and not always easy to read as a coherent whole. On the west side of the village stand the early monastic buildings: St Feichin's church, Teampall Fionain, a souterrain (an underground stone-lined passage, typically associated with early medieval sites), an anchorite's cell, and St Feichin's mill. No trace survives of any enclosing boundary around the original monastery. The present road through the village does not quite follow the medieval main street, evidenced by the fact that it bypasses both surviving town gates. At the centre sits a triangular market place with a small village green, on which a seventeenth-century cross has been placed. A lane runs east past Christian's Castle towards the motte and bailey. Some of the masonry in and around the village may predate 1700, though without detailed structural analysis that remains uncertain.