The local form of the name, recorded as "Vauk", led the scholar Whitley Stokes in 1893 to propose a link with Saint Vogue of Lan Veoc, a settlement south of the bay of Douarnenez in Brittany. It was a tidy theory, and it gave the place an appealingly transatlantic flavour. But E.A. Dalton, writing in 1920, dismantled the connection by tracing the name through what he described as the Flemish-influenced speech of the Anglo-Norman settlers in the region, arriving instead at St. Féichín, a seventh-century Irish monastic figure principally associated with Fore in Co. Westmeath. The well sits about a hundred metres from an old church that was likely under Féichín's patronage, which makes the identification considerably more plausible than any Breton detour.

Féichín is one of the more extensively mythologised figures in the early Irish church. His pedigree connects him to the Fothairt, the tribal grouping from which the name of the Forth barony in Wexford is itself derived, so his presence in this corner of the country is not as unlikely as it might first appear. He is associated with monasteries at Ballysadare in Co. Sligo, Cong in Co. Mayo, and Omey Island in Co. Galway, but Fore remained his principal foundation. He is thought to have died of plague somewhere around AD 665 to 668. The pattern, a traditional gathering at a holy well combining religious observance with communal festivity, was held here on 20th January, which is Féichín's feast day, as John O'Donovan recorded around 1840. The well was also credited with a cure for toothache, a specific and common category of healing attributed to such sites across Ireland.

By the time an excavation was carried out in 1975, the original structure had been almost entirely lost. Stokes had described steps leading down to water some two feet deep, the well enclosed on three sides by a stone wall; the excavators found only two stones still in their original positions. What remains today is a natural spring on a gentle east-facing slope, with a stream running north-east from it, the whole surrounded by a scrub-covered earthen bank that is most likely the spoil from that same excavation.