Club history · 1967–1972
Kilmore United
Two young men, a meeting in April 1967, and a team playing out of a field halfway between Kilmore and Annacloy.
It began, as so much Irish football did, with the summer of 1966. In the euphoria that followed the World Cup, two young local men, Bobby McClure and Dennis Lennon, decided Crossgar should have a football team. After a few friendly matches they called a meeting in April 1967 to put the thing on a proper footing, and since most of the players came from the village of Kilmore, the name chosen was Kilmore United.
The first competitive games came in the Killyleagh summer league, and in 1968–69 the club entered the Newcastle & District League, the junior league that served the towns and villages of Co. Down. Home was Hamilton’s Field, a pitch sitting halfway between the villages of Kilmore and Annacloy: a borrowed field, in the truest tradition of how clubs like this start.
The newspapers of the day carry the club’s first traces in print. By August 1970 the Newry Reporter listed Kilmore United in Division One of the league alongside Annalong Rangers, Rathfriland, RAF Bishopscourt, Down United, Down Olympic, Banbridge BC and Kilkeel. Village football with an air base thrown in. That January the same paper’s Harry Clarke Cup draw recorded “Kilmore United get a bye”, and the earliest match report yet found is the Banbridge Chronicle of 15 January 1971: Banbridge Boys’ Club Old Boys “travelled to Kilmore and were surprisingly defeated 5–3 by a determined home team, which gave the club one of their hardest games of the season”. A five-goal afternoon at Hamilton’s Field, in black and white.
The Newcastle League years brought the club’s first final, the Harry Clarke Cup, lost to Annalong Rangers after a replay. They also brought two men into the fold whose influence would outlast almost everything else from the era: Robert Adams, who would come to be known simply as “Mr Kilmore”, and his good friend Davy Harper. The ground the club plays on today carries Robert’s name, and his story runs through the chapters that follow.
Four years of junior football taught the young club what it wanted to be. What came next was a new name, a new ground and a new league, and that is where the story properly begins.