The name on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1839 and 1840 reads 'St. Vogue's Chapel', but a writer around 1680 called it the chapel of St. Vake. A nineteenth-century scholar, Stokes, argued in 1893 that 'Vake' or 'Vauk' was a corrupted form of the Breton saint Vogue, linked to Lan Veoc on the bay of Douarnenez in Brittany, and on that basis claimed the saint for Ireland. Dalton, writing in 1920, dismissed the connection and argued instead, through the linguistic residue of the Flemish speech brought by Anglo-Norman settlers, that the saint in question is St. Féichín of Fore in Co. Westmeath. Féichín, who died of plague around AD 665 to 668 and was particularly associated with the monastic life, founded or was connected to early monasteries at Ballysadare, Cong, and Omey Island. One genealogical tradition places him among the Fothairt tribes, from whom the barony of Forth, in which this site sits, takes its name, which would give the identification a pleasing local logic.

The ruins themselves sit within a grass-covered, roughly D-shaped enclosure defined by an earthen bank that also serves as the townland boundary with Nethertown. Excavations carried out in 1975 revealed three distinct phases of activity. The earliest was a small wooden oratory, just 2.25 metres by 1.5 metres, defined by post-holes and evidently destroyed by fire; radiocarbon dating of charcoal from the post-holes placed this structure roughly in the early medieval period. The stone church was subsequently built directly over the burnt layer left by that fire. Much of the church's stonework was carted away in 1803 to build a Catholic church at Lady's Island, which accounts for the reduced state of its walls, though the east gable survives to 3.6 metres and retains its original narrow round-headed window, complete with glazing-groove and a small niche to one side. The walls were partially reconstructed during a conservation programme in the 1940s. After the church fell out of use, the enclosure took on a different purpose: it became a burial ground for drowned mariners from ships wrecked near Carnsore Point. The only surviving headstone marks a sailor from the 'William' of Weymouth, lost in 1818; others buried here were from the 'Ceres' in 1866, the 'Langdale' in 1879, and the 'Sem', a Hungarian vessel wrecked in 1884. Ten burials recorded inside the church itself were mostly infants, and one adult burial pre-dates even the earliest wooden oratory, suggesting the site was in use long before any structure was raised above it.